Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with more space to test them, but very limited internet.

The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.

- To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the toolchains and flasher programs you need.

- The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't get it just by plugging the board into your computer.

- The docs are hosted at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out, but this is seemingly not a primary concern.

I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!

I think a lot of those problems get solved with scale and diversity of users/contributors.

Look at Linux. In the last decade there's been a huge boon and tbh, the biggest part of that is usability. UI/UX got a lot nicer and cleaner. I mean another part is Microsoft and Apple getting more hostile and people looking for alternatives, but usability is what provided those people space and a larger more diverse community is what made it more approachable.

What I'm saying is, keep up the criticism but let's also make sure to interpret it as feedback rather than pure complaint. So we can turn these things into what they can be. After all, this is the place where we make great products, right?

And never underestimate the criticality of documentation. It seems burdensome and annoying since it is always changing, but you can't get people to join your cause if they don't know how to. In your company or your OSS project. It's a very profitable investment