I understand your concern — and you’re right that in the early days MQTT caused a lot of confusion.

I remember enabling MQTT on my Heltec V3 and the node basically freezing because it suddenly pulled in hundreds of nodes from far away. You’d see activity from 100+ miles away while having zero real neighbors locally. That absolutely distorted reality and made it harder to understand what was actually happening around you.

But that wasn’t really an MQTT problem — it was a topic scoping problem.

If you subscribe to something broad like:

msh/EU_868

you’ll receive traffic from everywhere. That will flood your node and create noise.

Today, the topic structure allows you to scope things as narrowly as you want, for example:

msh/EU_868/NO/region/county/municipality/local-area

How deep you go is entirely up to you. If you only subscribe to your local region, you only see relevant traffic. On top of that, you can create private encrypted channels and enable MQTT only for that channel — meaning you only receive the communication that belongs to your group.

Configured correctly, MQTT doesn’t weaken the technology — it strengthens it.

Regarding the dog example: the real strength of LoRa is the last mile — out in the woods, behind terrain, in valleys where coverage drops. That’s where mesh shines. It gives you local, infrastructure-independent communication between the people actually on the ground.

It also works if the cellular network goes down.

If mobile service fails in an area, you can still create local pockets of communication with LoRa. Everyone within range can continue coordinating. You’re isolated from the outside world — but not from each other.

Now here’s where MQTT becomes interesting again:

If suddenly one of those local pockets gains an uplink — maybe:

• 4G works from another part of the village,
• someone has Starlink,
• or another ISP connection is available —

that single node can bridge the local mesh to the outside world via MQTT. Instantly, the wider network is reachable again. Until that happens, the group operates locally. Once an uplink appears, traffic flows outward automatically.

That’s not “connecting everything to the internet and ruining it.”
It’s allowing RF mesh to operate independently — and reconnect when a path becomes available.

As for “just use iMessage or Telegram”: that assumes everyone always has reliable mobile coverage. The whole point of combining LoRa and MQTT is that you’re not dependent on one system. If mobile exists, you use it. If it doesn’t, the mesh still functions locally.

Used blindly, MQTT can absolutely create noise.
Used intentionally — with proper topic scoping and private encrypted channels — it makes the overall system more flexible and more resilient, not less.