I’m curious about them, was looking at meshtastic, but then one of the articles mentioned limitations that one of the other two fixed, but unsure what can run which, why you would choose one over the other, or why there’s 3 standards which further splinters the community and lessens what you can talk through.

From what ive seen:

• Meshtatic is fantastic at communications ad-hock.
• Meshcore is fantastic if you have static infastructure to work with.
• reticulum is using the same tech but for a different purpose. more like traditional internet.

All three have phone apps, can work on computers, and are in active development. Theres more Meshtastic nodes than anything else but all three can be used on the same devices.

I would try meshtastic first if I was new. Theres a metric ton of nodes in a LOT of major cities. Hope that helps!

In general Meshcore can reach further than Meshtastic. It really depends on what your local mesh is. I can reach people from several different states on Meshcore

The tech is the same, its mostly the hops and verification infa thats there in meshcore vs tastic.

Ive found tastic works best in like events, camping, out on the water, etc.... because it works faster at establishing that initial push nodes. Core is VERY slow at the initial day or so of populating.

That being said its all LORA. Your not wrong, core I can get into multiple states miles and miles away. Technically tastic can too, but its a longshot with their 7 hop limit.

When I worked with software for both projects, it was interesting to see the design choices too. Core had some benefits using Tastic as the model. And Tastic had some huge code cruft inside the main python cli and documentation for years. Both are still fantastic projects.

I'm not terribly well-versed on the subject but it seems the major difference is in what device does what.

In Meshtastic, every device is a node. In a sufficiently dense environment this leads to way too much noise consuming bandwidth and muddying signals.

Meshcore has dedicated nodes and the user-devices only operate as clients.

Enjoy mesh
https://map.kiekr.app/

https://meshcore.ninja/

Have a look at europe.