There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
What do you need 8 extra hours for? Affording the 8 other nodes you buy after your first one?
My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.
Ah, well the good thing is its pretty easy to set up. Most nodes are already flashed with recent enough firmware, so you just attach antennas, connect to your phone, do some quick setup for your region and go for a walk.
Then you realize you want a node that stays at home.
Then you want one on your car.
And reachable from work.
Then you see that hill in the distance and think “that’d be a good spot”.
Then you see the mountain on the horizon and wonder if you could hit a node up there.
Then all of a sudden you realize you’ve single handedly set up the infrastructure for your part of the state and are out more cash money than you told your partner and need a side hustle to afford to finish the second mesh you’re building out.
Oh god I feel seen.
(Meshcore rather than meshtastic but tomato tamato)
😮💨
You can buy premade nodes on AliExpress or Etsy that are easy to use and portable. Pair it to your phone and start war driving.