Considering the amount of tech and self hosting types that live in cities, it seems like it would be popular to have little mesh intranets all over the place, but I’m not aware of any.
I read about NYC Mesh a while back, and I wonder if there are other similar things already in widespread use that I just haven’t heard about.
There seems to be more traffic on MeshCore than on Meshtastic, probably due to its greater range. Also, the core library seems to be MIT-licensed.
Besides, given the goals of Meshtastic/MeshCore (low power long range text communication without a radio license), LoRa is a sensible choice: It operates in appropriate radio bands, is power-efficient, and hardware is readily available at reasonable prices.
Sure, something like DASH7 would be more open but it’s also much harder to find hardware for. The most ideologically pure stack in the world won’t do anything if there’s not enough users to actually form a mesh.
WiFi is useless when you’re trying to send messages over long distances without any infrastructure beyond “I tied a few battery-powered transceivers to trees along the way”. It has completely low range and high power draw.
Packet radio gets you a lot of range but may require a license for legal operation. It also has high power requirements; you’re not going to run your radio setup off a 1000 mAh battery for a week.