ENHANCEMENT: Channel Discovery Mechanism

[jlp78]

Raven needs a channel discovery mechanism.

Currently, channels must be added to your Raven instance manually. This is fine for private channels, but there needs to be a way to publish a list of public channels. Perhaps a new service type could be created for Raven (it would just need to be text) that could be searched for in the mesh directory.

[edkraus]

IMHO this request is not fair to Tim. Be precise. Do you want a feature to crawl the AREDN mesh to find all the RAVEN channels that folks have installed on their local RAVEN instances? Do you want a feature to find MeshCore channels? How would an AREDN device crawl MeshCore to find them? What is the purpose? You want to find people on MeshCore to talk with without investing $50 in a MeshCore device? Currently in the Cascadia region on MC there is a public channel, perhaps a hundred hashtag channels, and an unknown number of private channels. On top of this each device can have private messaging between devices that have shared a key. MeshCore is working fine, AREDN is working fine ... what is the use case for any of this?

[jlp78]

I'd be find with a public registry where people could publish information about channels. Even better if Raven automatically posted to that registry when you create a channel (could be another check box, "publish this channel publicly?"). Perhaps Raven instances running on supernodes could host a registry for their local mesh island.

It doesn't have to be automated, but having a mechanism to find existing channels is desirable in my view. An automated/automatic system would be great, but a simple web server with a list of channels (possibly sortable by region) would be acceptable.

[aanon4]

A list of channels is easy enough - but I think the problems are in the details. A long list of meaningless, possibly duplicate, channels names (how many Test channels do you want to see) doesn't seem very helpful. And should a channel be public? No one owns a channel so who gets to decide that.

I'm happy with channel discovery being out of band at this point in the alpha, but open to a detailed alternative option which people can agree on.

[aanon4]

Okay, a few new thoughts on this. There are some channels which are always public - the Meshtastic presets, the MeshCore preset, and the AREDN preset. Not very useful ... but ... also the #CHANNELs are always public too, because all you need is the name to use it. Importantly you dont need the key.

So, I've added the first (I'm sure there'll be more) / command - if you type /channels into your message window it will list the known public channels on your local mesh. It does not do channels everywhere at this point; but we'll start with this.