Briar messenger and internet gateway?

Hi.
I am very interested in using this to connect a town where my cousin is in the mountains in spain with zero communication but want to use Briar messenger as it doesnt need server but i wonder if anybody has try it?.

Hi and welcome,

you are not alone with your request :wink:

You can push this topic on Briar’s gitlab repo:

Seems like the Briar devs are not very interested, because the aren’t very familiar with the achievable range nor the use case.

Another thread for your information:

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I’ve got two open-source apps on my phone right now:

Briar: Is a good general messaging service over the internet or failing that Wifi or Bluetooth. I can use it with ‘normal’ people doing normal things as a general messaging tool.

Meshtastic: Provides long-range comms when connected via Bluetooth to an ESP32 device.

Unfortunately, these two apps don’t talk to each other. So I have to decide if I’m on Internet/Wifi mode or ESP32 LoRa mode. My contacts need to install two apps and guess which I’m going to use to contact them.

If the Meshtastic Android app additionally supported Briar message types & functionality then It would make things much more seamless.

Briar devs don’t really seem to get the power of a LoRa mesh, which is a shame.

Do we get the power of what Briar have?

MQTT is what you want to use to bridge Meshtastic to other networks using IP. Probably easiest to use meshtastic in both locations if you only want to use one app.

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Yeah, but the app I want to use has all the features of Briar, which Meshtatic currently lacks.

Briar is a general-purpose messaging app, not just something I’d just use when hiking, to talk to other people who are hiking.

Meshtastic is a general purpose messaging app too, just with far better range than 20M. People use it for lots of things other than hiking, that just happens to be the main use case without cellular service. Briar looks kind of neat, but the range seems pretty short.

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Briar messages travel around the whole world, using the internet. They can also do short-range via Bluetooth or Wifi. Basically all the bits Meshtastic doesn’t currently do, with a significant user base.

I just think it would be really nice if both came together into a unified service. The 500k+ Briar users could learn about Meshtastic as an option.

Meshtastic users would have internet/wifi/Bluetooth comms from the same interface/contacts list.

Pull requests are welcome, probably going to need MQTT as a bridge still as we have a hard 32 node limit now and a theoretical limit of about 200 which is not really compatible with 500K users.

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I’ll open a ticket on the Briar git too, to see if I can get them interested.

I don’t imagine you’d get a 500k node LoRa network! Although we did discuss scaling/geo routing back in the Disaster Radio days.

Most messages from Briar just flow over the internet of course. It would need some logic; If no route via the internet, Bluetooth or wifi, then, and only then, push the message over to the Meshtastic node.

Hola, meshtastic puede resolverlo, en qué zona esta tu primo?