This sort of follows on from my semi-satirical “real” ham radio post. I first heard about QSO1 while lurking on the Brandmeister Worldwide talkgroup. It’s a very nifty app to be sure, but sometimes I do wonder if I’m fooling myself. Like what separates the average QSO1 experience from, say, Discord, besides worse audio and fewer text chat features.
Yes, you are potentially transmitting over any number of repeaters on RF, but if QSO1 becomes the path of least resistance for rag chewers like myself and everyone ends up using it, what makes it “real” ham radio?
Indeed. Just to set the record straight here, I am A HUGE proponent and unofficial cheerleader of free, open and decentralized protocols. Free as in freedom, jot necessarily free beer, as that saying goes. Normal people probably don’t think about these things, but they underpin an internet that maintains a low barrier to entry and exit. Meaning, it’s made for ordinary people to use, participate in, and even help build with their own services. Things like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and the other tools you can host yourself are amazing and personally interesting to me. I mean, email is decentralized…we sort of take that one for granted but that’s a side topic discussion right there.
However, I don’t get recreating closed walled off systems that don’t do the job as well as I mentioned, and require you to be licensed in your country to use it to boot.
These networks are run by centralized authorities, or sometimes just one or two people. I’m assuming this app is another scenario like this.
To me, this the worst of all combinations.