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nsxwolfyesterday at 2:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

I built one and found absolutely no use for it. No one ever, and I mean ever, answers you. It's sort of like ham radio, where you get your technician license and get on a net and discover people are just talking about their antennas. Except it's worse, because all the antenna discussions are happening on Reddit and Discord and not on the network itself.

People are very enamored with what you could theoretically do with it, but they never actually do any of it. It's a hardware fetish, it's all about building boxes with solar panels and seeing how many nodes you can light up on the map. Reminds me of another ham radio thing I never got into, "contesting".


Replies

devilbunnyyesterday at 10:11 PM

The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.

Melatonicyesterday at 8:42 PM

HAM I think used to be more popular when it didnt have all this competition and it makes total sense