If you dont use the default LongFast meshtastic is really empty. I switched my node to MediumSlow, since it’s like 86% faster than LongFast. I knew there would not be any in my area, so I subscribed to the msh/US MQTT topic and theres still nobody else. I’m going to leave it like that for a while and see if I hear anything during any kind of band openings or catch any other MQTT nodes trying out that topic. And yes, both uplink and downlink are enabled. I do know that there are some nodes in the Bay Area on msh/US/mqtt-bayme-sh, but I am not near their.
as far as I can tell in the hobbyist circles near me, no or rarely (things like communicating while hiking or camping are discussed but mostly in the hypothetical it seeeeems like). It’s treated like ham radio where I’m at, where it could theoretically be useful in an emergency but until there’s a major disaster to test it it’s just nerds pinging eachother just to see what they can do. amateur radio is actually useful though, not sure how meshtastic will fare.
It seems like there are more practical uses for people in certain circumstances outside of the city though. I’ve seen homesteads and farms pop up as little remote clusters on some of the online maps, and people talk about having a home base station on a tower or the roof and then they can communicate with eachother from out in the fields (tends to be pretty flat so the range is better). Still hard to know how well used it is in those scenarios
Personally I like the idea and would actually use it for local chit-chat with friends family and fellow nerds, but the reliability of message delivery even when you’re both connected to the mesh pretty well, seemed poor. I heard the newest firmware releases were supposed to improve message routing (not just using flood routing for all messages all the time) but I haven’t tried them yet. Even with how big the mesh near me is, all the meta chat seems to be happening on discord not on the mesh itself