I wanted to like Reticulum. I found it was unstable and often crashed my tower—particularly Nomadnet. I feel like if something similar was made in C, it probably would be pretty okay, although I have noticed the kinds of people I interacted with there were kinda jerkish on average. Of course, the internet in general has that problem, so that's not a "new thing", but I guess the "I'm totally off the grid, bro" has its new own hubris.
Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it? It's seemingly one person on Github and the "community" is otherwise on Discord and Telegram, which is pretty sus.
I seems to have the first part in common with Reticulum.
I know what you are getting at, but I think that's an unfair characterization after all.
I don't want to shit-talk Ratspeak, but the foregone description of community and momentum seems far fetched. Additionally, the vibe is pretty off compared to Reticulum. Nothing here points to "successor" IMO.
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I got the impression that Reticulum's main claim is that it replaces the IP stack with a future-proof, encrypted protocol for routing regardless of the underlying network medium. Which is not an insigificant claim to test, but boy would it be fantastic.
Would say your understanding is correct. It uses something similar to a "gossip" protocol where the public keys of other users are advertised. So it gets ride of IP addresses and can jump boundaries between different network types. I'm using it for BLE to BLE communication, I've seen videos of people using it for USB to USB communication. There aren't many limitations as long as data can flow.
> I've seen videos of people using it for USB to USB communication.
How would that work? Do you have a link?
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#64Just 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…
So what Matter is to Thread, Reticulum is to LoRa?
Nah, Reticulum is a agnostic to the underlying communication mediums. It can work over telegraph lines even
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#65[dead]
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#66Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#67While 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…
> robust protection against abuse
I would say it has a fairly reasonable number of protections with things like being able to prioritise certain interfaces and controlling the announce rate from a node and rate limiting the number of announces a destination makes. What in particular is abusable?
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would say your understanding is correct. It uses something similar to a "gossip" protocol where the public keys of other users are advertised. So it gets ride of IP addresses and can jump boundaries between different network types. I'm using it for BLE to BLE communication, I've seen videos of people using it for USB to USB communication. There aren't many limitations as long as data can flow.
> I've seen videos of people using it for USB to USB communication. How would that work? Do you have a link?
Was trying to find it but hard. Reticulum only needs some kind of way for bytes to move from one point to another. So USB with the serial data line works as well.
On the video was using for an embedded device without WiFi nor Bluetooth to communicate with the host computer where it was connected.
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#69Why are people developing these networks ? Who's funding these projects ? Someone knows something about the future like an internet split ?
I believe this project is primarily funded by functional autism and a sharp mind, enabled by a socially supportive environment.
It's mostly one dude who really went into the depths of it, considered a lot of details and managed to deliver a resolute implementation and presentation. Judging by the Ayn Rand quote, I believe he may ideologically fall onto the regarded side of the anarchist spectrum and may be less motivated by humanitarian aspects, as you may otherwise expect for "crisis resistant" technology. The rest of the small community seems to be made of similar libertarian type individuals, which may be one of the reasons why it doesn't gain more support). Regardless, in terms of economics, I believe the author actually decided not to play, so you may ask yourself, if you may have asked a leading question. I believe the actual answer concerning motivation is this: For the fun, the challenge and the beauty of it. It's a PoC/reference of an idea, rather than the answer to an immediate or anticipated need.
The ecosystem as a whole is a most lovely project to dive into, lot's of nuances to explore. Ideological differences aside, I am positively at awe, what the author accomplished there. Here is a spoiler, something stuck with me: A single RNode is enough to bootstrap the entire Reticulum network stack. It's web-hosting the firmware, software and documentation, everything you need, and every RNode can become a wifi access point for ad-hoc distribution. Beautiful, thoughtful feature you may merely accidentally stumble into, as it's just an understated side-note. The "it's just one guy" critique hits differently, when you see the extent of what that "one guy" actually accomplished.
Re: Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network
#70What 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.…
There is a full no_std Rust implementation called Leviculum, Python-free, compatible: https://codeberg.org/Lew_Palm/Leviculum
It has a lnsd daemon which runs the full stack as a native binary and some firmware implementations (like for the Heltec T114).