Deprecating Meshtastic in Montreal

As of today, Meshcore has overtaken Meshtastic in number of devices visible from maps in the greater Montreal area. While this might be a questionable heuristic, it's pretty clear when comparing the current Meshcore map and the Meshtastic map that Meshcore has already surpassed Meshtastic in raw numbers.

As of today, there are 54 Meshcore devices and at most 29 Meshtastic devices on those maps.

Last year, Meshcore barely existed at all.

Late 2025, I setup my first Meshcore companion, and I wasn't seeing any relays. In fact, I don't remember there being any relay in Montreal a couple of months ago.

In March 2026, a similar map survey showed about 25 Meshcore devices. A month later, there's double that number.

All that time, I tried to work with Meshtastic. I tried to ping people, talk, nothing went through. Telemetry showed me devices as far as Burlington, Vermont! And we'd sometimes hear messages from there. But I have never really seen a full conversation happen over Meshtastic.

Now, with about a dozen Meshcore relays visible from my roof, I already feel the mesh is more reliable. It's just a hunch, but I feel Meshcore's more deliberate, "infrastructure" approach will scale better than Meshtastic's more "ad-hoc" approach.

So this is my call: let's deprecate Meshtastic and focus on other technologies. Right now, Meshcore certainly seems to have the momentum.

But let's keep an eye on Reticulum too; good progress has been made on various firmware projects based on micro-Reticulum, which embed a full transport node onto the same micro-controller devices that run Meshtastic or Meshcore. It's not yet as easy to deploy yet, but certainly something to keep an eye on.