Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

What is confusing to me is that this is intended to be run (I believe) on LoRa devices, but it requires a PC with python running. I researched this for a project at work involving these devices. (Sx128x or sx1262 LorA radios connected to an ARM MCU). I skipped it and used the radios directly due to the Python requirement; these devices, which seem like they would be the Reticulum target, run bare-metal or RTOS, i.e. C, C++ or Rust with no or minimal OS, and no python.

There's a rust port of the Reticulum, but it's std rust, which has a similar problem to Python.

https://ratspeak.org/ seems like a modern fork of Reticulum built in Rust and with a fairly active community

Just to share some experience: 100% privacy on these kind of networks is more a sympton of talking to software engineers than the radio reality observed on mesh networks.

Very often what comes as top priority is communication itself, which means radio-amateur radio frequencies where encryption is only available for signing messages but not the content.

Reticulum can be 100% private as it can choose to send packets in plain text. Can also broadcast messages without a specific target receiver, these are features that are necessary for radio transmission on amateur frequencies.

On LoRa: attention that default reticulum is still "too talkative". Meaning that in some LoRa frequencies there is a legal limit to how many messages (transmission time) your device can send per hour and even the automated announcements (to say "Hello, I'm here") quickly waste that available space.

On Internet: reticulum is great. I'm seeing about 700 connected devices across different hubs.

People often compare reticulum to Meshcore or Meshtastic but they often neglect one important aspect: those are exclusive LoRa implementations. Reticulum is the same protocol (language) no matter the network underneath. This means that you can connect a phone via BLE to a LoRa link which on the other side is connected on the Internet and then flies down to another BLE somewhere. This is not common to find on reticulum but possible.

There is a lot of good work on the topic. Maybe it will surface here on HN soon when more stable. In October there is an yearly event in Coimbra, Portugal where these topics are presented and tested in deep.

I had a lot of hope for reticulum, but it's a one man project with a near burned out maintainer, taking on an absolutely monstrous task.

I'm now cautiously optimistic. This or something similar is likely the long term future of mesh networks, but in the short to medium term, meshcore is the way to go.

> Reticulum does not use source addresses. No packets transmitted include information about the address, place, machine or person they originated from.

Sure, but if it’s anything like MeshCore, a few observer nodes will be able to see which repeaters the message first entered the network from and from that know roughly where it was located.

Why are there not more developers? Is ratspeak where they all prefer to be?

Also reticulum and crypto seem like they go together. Non-http crypto transactions?

What about entirely-non-http blockchains?

A new bitcoin that is completely off the internet as we know it??

While the project is interesting from a technical perspective, there are some serious issues. The main implementation has a vague, non-standard licence, but this is not overly problematic as alternative implementations can simply be used instead. A bigger problem with Reticulum is that it does not appear to offer robust protection against abuse. Messages are protected by cryptography, but there are many other ways to render a network unusable, which will inevitably happen on a larger scale.

Unfortunately whenever I see the name, I am always reminded of part of the anatomy

Was also the name of the internet in Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

Why are people developing these networks ? Who's funding these projects ? Someone knows something about the future like an internet split ?

it'd be nice to see a comparison to rayfish.xyz

It seems like there's 14 different mesh networks that all are out there claiming to be decentralized and this and that. This is ridiculous.

We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.

No published specification, single Python implementation. Shame, as this solves a problem that badly needs to be solved well.

The resistance is out there somewhere?

[dead]

[flagged]