Freifunk Meschede is back – the community is being rebuilt

Community
1

Hey everyone,

after we’ve already started rebuilding Freifunk Brilon over the past few weeks, there’s now also news from Meschede:

Freifunk Meschede is back. :slightly_smiling_face:

The community originally existed for many years, and Freifunk was quite well represented in Meschede at times. In recent years, however, the project has become increasingly quiet, and many of the remaining sites are still running on the infrastructure and firmware of Freifunk Winterberg.

We want to change that step by step now.

Currently, we’re going through the remaining sites in Meschede and the surrounding areas, trying to figure out which devices are still active, which sites still have an interest in Freifunk, and where older hardware should be replaced or migrated.

We’ve already received initial feedback from existing sites, and in the coming time, we expect to migrate the first remaining Meschede devices to the current infrastructure.

This is explicitly not about building a huge network overnight. Our goal is first to maintain the existing sites, rebuild the technical foundation properly, and then gradually add new sites together.

The website for Freifunk Meschede is also back online:

Technically, we’re working closely with the existing Freifunk community in the Hochsauerlandkreis, so Brilon and Meschede should not be operated as two completely separate islands in the long term.

What’s particularly important to us right now is staying in touch with the former and current Freifunk sites. After all, some routers have been hanging around somewhere in Meschede for many years without the operators necessarily knowing how the respective project progressed.

If anyone here in the forum from the earlier Freifunk Meschede days is still reading, has old contacts, knows something about former sites, or was perhaps even active in Freifunk Meschede themselves:

Please get in touch.

Old information, configurations, contacts, maps, photos, or simply experiences from back then can be quite helpful in rebuilding.

And of course, we’re also happy to hear from people in Meschede and the surrounding area who would like to join Freifunk today. :slightly_smiling_face:

Many greetings from the Sauerland
Adrian

2

FTR: 4830.org e. V. formally distances itself from the activities of user @VonderWulf in the Meschede area. Details here.

3

Thanks for the clarification.

You’re right: For Meschede, I didn’t obtain any concrete approval or binding technical support from 4830.org e. V. in advance. The wording in my original post, that we would work closely together technically and that migrations to a current infrastructure were to be expected, was therefore too broad and misleading. I explicitly correct this.

I will adapt the post accordingly and will neither announce migrations nor technical infrastructure or support from 4830.org e. V. for Meschede until further notice.

Whether and on what technical and organizational basis Meschede can be continued in the future must first be clarified independently and reliably. Until then, I will not make any further commitments.

With that, I consider the matter to be substantively settled from my perspective.

4

is down.

5

It does work. For the insertion of small amounts of money.

image
image1639×895 165 KB

6

Hmm, I get:

wusel@cohen:~$ wget -O - --save-headers http://freifunk-meschede.net/
--2026-09-07 21:40:25--  http://freifunk-meschede.net/
Resolving freifunk-meschede.net (freifunk-meschede.net)… 91.195.240.13
Connecting to freifunk-meschede.net (freifunk-meschede.net)|91.195.240.13|:80 … connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response … 403 Forbidden
2026-09-07 21:40:26 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

wusel@cohen:~$ wget -O - --save-headers https://freifunk-meschede.net/
--2026-09-07 21:42:14--  https://freifunk-meschede.net/
Resolving freifunk-meschede.net (freifunk-meschede.net)… 91.195.240.13
Connecting to freifunk-meschede.net (freifunk-meschede.net)|91.195.240.13|:443 … connected.
GnuTLS: A fatal TLS alert was received.
GnuTLS: received alert [112]: The sent server name was not recognized
Unable to establish an SSL connection.

But the IP belongs to Sedo, and whois looks odd; seems to have been paid for 3 years in advance; but why Sedo then?

Updated Date: 2026-09-07T07:50:07.000Z
Creation Date: 2025-01-30T10:30:09.000Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2028-01-30T10:30:09.000Z

Anyway, a pointer to the ‚fact-check‘ on this topic.