Kind of difficult to argue it's a useless enthusiast network when there is 6 million gateways and 300 million end devices deployed worldwide. And no other technology that gives a better combination of low power use + high range.
LoRa is actually a technology built by a massive consortium of vendkrs. Enthusiasts use it creatively in ways like this, and much of the rest of the time this technology is deployed for anything from silly IoT chicken coop controllers to disaster zones and mountain rescue, plus much else beside.
Not useless at all, these kind of ad-hoc mesh networks are perfect for communication during protests or other organizing, particularly when state actors are trying to monitor or disrupt cellular (like what happened in Ukraine protests years ago).
> Not useless at all, these kind of ad-hoc mesh networks are perfect for communication during protests or other organizing, particularly when state actors are trying to monitor or disrupt cellular (like what happened in Ukraine protests years ago).
LoRa is not going to be useful for that at all. It's for small messages over long range, at long intervals (38 bytes sensor data, for example)/
The post describes quite clearly that there are means to message over these links. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but a lot of good often comes from things that aren't perfect.
