So I just saw a video where somebody made a bulletin board system over the mesh like it’s fucking 1999 or something and it got me thinking Would it be possible to send web pages over the mesh as long as they were small?

I went to the DuckDuckGo homepage and copied its HTML source code into a text editor and found out it was something like 46,000 characters and with a 288 character limit it would take 145 messages to send that across. Each message would be something like 0.69% of that page.

It doesn’t seem impossible, but you would have to make your pages very lightweight like they were in the 1990s in order to do it efficiently.

  • mesamune
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    27 days ago

    You would probably get better performance with gopher.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 days ago

      protocols from the 80s definitely have a place here, NNTP is a great fit for peer-to-peer flood-fill forum traffic - they had that figured out over low bandwidth links 40 years ago

    • @[email protected]OP
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      17 days ago

      I wonder if some optimizations could be made. For example, I saw a video about something called mesh core that somebody was working on that holds routes in memory so that instead of flooding the mesh, it would directly send the data to the node that it’s meant for, which might increase the speed.

      • mesamune
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        14 days ago

        Its certainly interesting! The local community is going to give it a shot at some point. Its way to alpha right now for me but its ultimately what I want. Meshtastic is awesome, but having more garentee on people reviving your messages would be ideal.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          4 days ago

          My node is the size of a credit card and the router is 4 miles from my house. It works well enough, mostly, but I am at the edge of what I would consider to be acceptable.

          Edit: At least for an antenna, this small. If I were to have a node with a larger antenna, I know for a fact that it would work better.

          • mesamune
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            14 days ago

            Nice glad to hear. I just want something more reliable than throwing messages into the void and hoping someone gets it.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              24 days ago

              Fair enough, you do get acknowledgements if it’s heard by at least somebody. And throwing messages into the void is kind of the fun part about it.

              Because of band openings, for example, the local router has seen nodes several hundred miles away, and therefore I have seen nodes several hundred miles away.