First of all, I want to make it very clear what this is not. This is not a post intended to criticize the developers or past decisions. I want to thank the developers for their hard work and dedication to the project. This also isn’t a plea for me to join the core team or any sort of similar misunderstanding. I want to be very clear about my intentions: this is simply an effort to understand how we, as the greater community, can both better comprehend and better contribute to Meshtastic.
All that said, a number of decisions have been made with little to no communication about the change, why it’s made, and where the direction of particular features may be headed. I don’t know what the actual solution is, but some of these decisions need community input as well. I understand that collecting this feedback could be difficult, but that’s what an RFC-like process is for (maybe the meshtastic/rfc repo could be of some help in this). In particular, the router_client role change left a lot of people confused and with no recourse for options.
The future of Meshtastic at the moment is relatively unclear, at least to me. Maybe there are other channels of communication that I’m missing, but I only know of future and upcoming work from random Discord messages that are sent that I happen to see or that happen to be passed along. I’m aware of the 3.0 work and the routing changes that are happening, but most people probably are not. Again, I’m not entirely sure the solution here, but as the larger community, we need to understand the future vision of the project.
Lastly, there are problems around documentation. I understand, documentation is always a thorn in the side of developers. As I mentioned in earlier conversations, though, I feel like the UIs are missing information that could be vital to the end user’s configuration and setup. For instance, some of the public MQTT kerfuffle could have been solved by better messaging around the MQTT configuration.
Again, I greatly appreciate the hard work and dedication of the developers, but there are areas where improvement is needed. The lack of clear information about changes and future directions can leave community members feeling disconnected and confused. By involving the community more in decision-making and enhancing documentation, we can ensure that everyone has a better understanding of the project’s trajectory and can contribute more effectively. I look forward to contributing to the solution and helping bridge the gap between the community and the project leaders, ensuring we can all work together towards a better future for Meshtastic.