E1744: MeshCore Team Feud Here's What Happened

Discover the full story behind the dramatic MeshCore fork. In this video, we break down the official blog post from the MeshCore core team explaining "The Split" — from secret AI "vibe coding" with Claude, the surprise trademark filing, loss of trust, to the launch of the new official home at meshcore.io.
Learn what this means for the 38,000+ node MeshCore network, 100,000+ app users, firmware development, and the future of human-written open-source mesh networking hardware.
New Meshcore Website - https://meshcore.io
Devices that work for Meshcore - https://amzn.to/4n073rH
Blogpost - https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ham-radio-2-0--2042782/support.

Speaker 1: Meshcre has split.

Speaker 2: There is turmoil in the community, and I kind of

called this a few months ago. I was afraid of this.

I was afraid this would happen, and sure enough it

has happened. Let's talk about it.

Speaker 1: Now.

Speaker 2: First and foremost, let me say that the more and

more I toy around with meshcre, the more I like it.

Mesh Tastic I started out. I've been using a Meshtastic

for about two years. And when I put up a

video about mesh Tastic, when I put up a video

about hardware devices like my Treker Delta from Spec five,

or my Spec five relay device, or my seed Studios

T one thousand pocket device. When I put up videos

about hardware and talk about Meshtastic, a lot of people

come along in the comments and say, well, you should

be using mesh Core. I'm like, dude, I'm talking about

hardware right now, but Meshcore, Mestastic. I've been talking about

those for a couple of years, been talking about meshcor

for a short period of time, And when Meshcore kind

of first reared its head on the scene, my initial

thought was, uh, oh, how many more splinter cells, how

many more versions, how many more factions are we going

to see of a mesh tastic type firmware network community?

Whatever this happened with DMR, Okay, DMR. I'm not going

to get into a big long thing about DMR on

this video. Here's my short and sweet opinion of DMR.

I made a video I link it up here in

here somewhere saying what's wrong with DMR. DMR is, in

my opinion, the best digital voice mode that we have

in amateur radio. Okay, I'm not going to go into

why right now, but it is. I proved me wrong.

Put a comment, blow tell me why you think I'm wrong.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: But the reason that it didn't, it kind of fell

flat on its face, and not as many people are

doing it anymore, at least that's been my speculation, is

because Brandmeister ruined it.

Speaker 1: Brandmeister ruined it.

Speaker 2: Long story short, there were sea bridges around for about

five years before Brandmeister came online. Brandmeister came online, duplicated

everyone's talk groups, put all this the regional talk groups

and made them worldwide, and created a network of more

hot spots than repeaters and a one hundred and fifty

dollars hot spot is not going to ever sound as

good as a fifteen hundred dollars two thousand dollars commercial

grade Motorola repeater or four hundred to six hundred dollar

commercial grade bridgecomm or Motorola repeater used repeater.

Speaker 1: Maybe Okay, it's just not going to happen.

Speaker 2: So the splintering of the networks for DMR kind of

ruined it because not everyone's on the same page anymore.

So is that where we're looking at form meshcre. Now

check out this article I found yesterday. Now, a couple

of you shared this with me. I found I think

I found this myself before somebody shared it with me.

Speaker 1: I don't remember.

Speaker 2: I found a couple of links, and then before I

looked at it, one of you had sent me a

message with this link, and then we were talking about

it in discord. I was talked about it in discord

with a couple other hand radio guys or a couple

of YouTube guys.

Speaker 1: But this article was written yesterday at the time of

this recording. Okay.

Speaker 2: Since its inception, mesh Core development team have been working

to build meshcre. This article is titled why the Split.

We've released more than eighty five versions of Meshcore companion.

I did a video about a deep dive in the

Mushcore app last week. Repeater Room server firmwares with more

than seventy five hardwork variants. All of this has been

handcrafted by humans. We have always been wary of AI

generated code. I know a lot of you are worry

about that too, and with good reason. But everyone is

free to do what they want and experiment, et cetera.

But one of our own, Andy Kirby, decided to branch

out and extensively use claud code. I don't know what

this is. I'm a I'm not a developer. I don't

know what claud code is. Okay, so somebody tell me

in the comments below what claud code is. And has

decided to aggressively take over all the components of the

Meshcore ecosystem standalone devices, mobile app, webflash or webconfig tools.

And he's kept a small detail secret that it's all

majority vibe coded. Again, I don't really know what that is.

Claud code and vibe coded or AI generated code, monsters

code websites. I'm guessing they said they ran a poll

and asked in the Meshcore discord about AI and trust,

and these are the results. Would you trust an AI

generated Mesh firm? Where eighty one percent voted no, okay?

Do you have a right to know the software you

are using buying is majority vibe coded sixty five percent

voted yes and the other thirty five percent voted I

don't care okay. The team didn't feel like it was

our place to protest until we recently discovered the Endies

applied for mesh Core trademark in March of this year

and didn't tell any of us. We've tried discussing this

and what his intentions are, but those broke down and

now we have no communication with Dandy. It's been stressful

of a few minutes trying to sort this out and

is now a sad day to bring this out to

the public. It's been a slap in the face of

the team that have worked so hard on the project

to have an insider team come up with robot and

a lawyer with a robot and a lawyer official Mesh Corp.

The use of the official status is what is currently

being contested. Andy's adamant that he owns the brand and

is using the word very heavily with his mesh os line.

Speaker 1: Now.

Speaker 2: I was told by someone last year. I think it

was last year. It was a few months ago. If

it wasn't last year, I was told by someone that

Andy Kirby started mesh Core, and I didn't think that

was true. I don't know if that's true. I don't

know if that's true. I originally heard that the mesh

Core guys, the original developers of mesh Corps, were part

of mesh Tastic and they wanted to go in a

different direction what the majority of mesh Tastic wanted to go,

and that they that's how they split, Okay, And then

someone told me no, and Andy Kirby started it because

he was the one that wanted to go in a

different direction. And now whatever team for mesh Core exists

now Andy is splitting from them, or more accurately, they're

splitting from him. And this is how it it starts.

This is how splinter networks and splinter things. This kind

of happened with broadband ham net. Broadbandham Net came along

and was utilizing old decrepit routers to flash with custom

firmware and create a broadband ham net network of two

point four gigahertz routers, and then Arden came along and said, no,

we don't want to only use those routers. We want

to use some really good, outdoor, up to date routers

like Ubiquity and tpe Link and these, and the Arden

network basically blossomed and took over. And because it was

it had more hardware options available and had better channel

options available. And then with DMR it just kind of

like there's all these different splinter cells. Brandmeister came along,

duplicated a bunch of talk groups. TGIF split off from

Brandmeister because those guys didn't get along. Now there's one

called like am net or am Amcore or something like that.

I don't know anything about those guys. And the Seabridge

network that was spun up in Texas and twenty ten

is still out there. Sixteen years later. We're still using

a Seabridge network in Texas, and I think those are

the best networks. And if you want to know why,

I've said that in this video up here, I shared

it earlier. But now we're seeing with mesh Core this

whole splinter thing. So my question is how much longer

before we see mesh core split again or mesh tastic

it self split off. Now we've got Meshtastic version one.

Now we got Meshtastic version new or alpha or whatever

you want to call it. How many more splits are

we going to see? So I'll link this article in

the description blow you guys can go.

Speaker 1: I'm kind of skipping around here a little bit.

Speaker 2: Meanwhile, in reality, the only official mesh core is in

the GitHub repository. It's the source of truth in terms

of what is meshcre, and Andy has never contributed to that.

I'm just reading an article here. If that's false about Andy,

I don't want to provide misinformation or fake news. I'm

reading this article on the meshcre website, and you guys

can go read it for yourself, okay, and you can

comment on it too. There's a place down here to

comment because it is a blog post. Okay, So there

we go right there. Since the internal split, we launched

mesh core dot io. Meshcore dot io is going to

be the new official site to get your firmware and

do your flashing and updates for meshcre. Any controls themeshcre

dot co dot uk and the original discord server. We've

been left with little other recourse and since launching the side,

and he copied the look and feel again using Claude,

even though we asked him not to. The Meshcore project

has been on an incredible journey, having only started in

January of twenty twenty five, so about a year and

four months ago at the time of this recording, it

has grown extremely fast. Meshcore mapp shows more than thirty

eight thousand nodes around the world. The official Meshcore app

has more than one hundred thousand plus active users across

Android and iOS. I did a whole video about the

Meshcore app just last week, so go check that out.

Speaker 1: I did a deep dive into it and it's.

Speaker 2: Got a few things that I didn't touch on, but

it's going to have more stuff added to it.

Speaker 1: I suspect as time goes by.

Speaker 2: It's pretty epic how we've all built such an incredible

community in such a short amount of time. In recent times,

we've seen an explosion of growth in meshcore websites and

dedicated specific countries mesh core communities. Meshcre in Portugal is

meshcore dot PT, Switzerland is meshcore dot ch and the

first successes in the UK meshcore dot co dot uk.

And he did do an amazing job helping to promote

the mesh core project on his personal on YouTube, but

it only promotes his own products. Now, Okay, where to

go from here? The Core team are pushing ahead with

the mesh core dot io website, the ongoing work of

firmware future development, bug fixes, managing prs, and developer discussions.

We now release change logs, blog posts and technical documentation

for all of the new firmware releases. Here mesh core

dot io blog dot, mesh cor io docs dot mesh

core io. And I think they have one down here

called Flasher. There's a flasher somewhere in here too, the

get hubs here reddit. There's a mesh core reddit subreddit.

I thought they had a Flasher group. Like you go

to flasher dot mesh core dot co dot uk and

that's where you flash your hardware for to load meshcre

firmware onto it. Okay, so here we go Flasher dot

mesh core dot io looks like this. Here we go

a lot of seed Studio, Lilygo Rack, wireless helltechs, you know,

all all of the things here, a lot of llocrow devices.

So short and sweet. What do you guys think about

this again? I kind of called this a few months ago.

I'm like, look, when Meshcore kind of first spun up

and people were talking, well, you need to switch to

the mesh Core, I'm like, oh gosh, we've got we've

got Brandmeister DMR again, which turned out to be, in

my opinion, not nearly as good as the original dMar.

And now we've got meshcre that, quite frankly, I'm liking

better than mesh Tastic. Now each one has its place.

The good thing about this whole mesh thing is that

there are different use case scenarios for each one. Hey,

Brandmeister just came in and duplicated things that people were doing, okay,

and they did add the ability to add hotspots to

their network, which you couldn't originally do with a sea bridge,

but now you can because Hams are creative and they

come up with new stuff all the time.

Speaker 1: But Meshcore is great for urban environments.

Speaker 2: Okay, So if you've got a dense area like a city,

and even an apartment building or a neighborhood or something,

you want to put up a mesh Core repeater. You

can hit advert and advertise your node hit the repeater,

and it's much better in those types of environments. If

you're going on a hike or an overland trail with

your buddies, your caravanning down the road with your buddies

in vehicles, mesh Tastic is better for ad hoc networks

because y'all are just kind of in your little group there,

moving along together, and even when you're camping, when you

get to your campsite, have other people in your campsite.

Meshtaski is great for that. At the MOREXFO in April

twenty twenty, we used both. We used Bill had a

repeater on his truck K zero WHW. Bill hand Radio

Tectonics is his YouTube channel. He had a repeater on

a meshcre repeater on his truck, so we were able

to use meshcre more efficiently there, but there was still

more The number of users on mesh tastic was still higher,

so each one has a different use case. And I

like both of them, but quite frankly, ever since I've

been playing around with meshcre, I kind of like it

a little bit better.

Speaker 1: I live in a metropolitan area.

Speaker 2: I live in the suburb of Dallas Fort Worth and

in the densely populated area. Mesh core does seem like

it's going to be a better use case in this area.

I'm actually working on a video to set up a

new solar node for a repeater on top of my

house that will be running meshcre as a repeater. So

what do you guys think? You think we're going to

see another split? Which one are you going with? Majority

of the comments on this blog post here that we

found are twenty two comments very much in favor all

my support behind this team, very much in favor of

the team. What happens the app was the official app,

meshcre is the official app.

Speaker 1: Here we go.

Speaker 2: Most of these comments are very positive towards the team

that wrote this blog, not towards Andy Kirby.

Speaker 1: Okay, so there we go. That's what it is.

Speaker 2: That's what we said, or that's what's been said, and

I want to know what you guys think about it.

Put a comment in the video below. Let I want

to know what meshcore devisors you're using. Also put that

as a comment in this video. Blow If you like

this video, check out these videos up here. These are

other mesh Core and mesh Tastic videos. That I've done

and we will catch you next time.