> Everyone you meet on a mesh is a real breathing nerd, who due to proximity has a lot in common with you. They are not trying to influence you or sell you anything
I wish... the Hamburg Meshcore mesh has some dumbass spammer spamming far-right youtube videos in the public channel for example. And from what I hear, Meshtastic also has issues with this kind of idiots.
Start spamming far-left YouTube videos to the public channel at the same time, according to the general theory of nutball political physics the two should cancel each other out
The problem is that takes up valuable airtime. The denser the mesh the more airtime is wasted on the junk.
In MeshCore a concept of regions has been recently introduced - you can scope channels and messages to a specific geographic region (which is set on a repeater) and it will not propagate outside of the given region.
That way local channels don't need to flood the whole mesh, same as with trying to send a message to someone or reach the management interface of a repeater you know is in a given area.
I run a few Meshcore nodes in Toronto - mostly as a nerd hobby. In some ways it has the feel of the 1990s internet and in some ways it's the same feel as ham radio . It has smart nerds, but also some unhinged people who are desperate to force people to hear them. Then there are the trolls...
All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated.
A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g