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Alternatively… https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
by cheschire 11mo ago
Alternatively…
https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
- 0x62 11mo agoHuge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem: - Sideband: iOS/Android chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband) - NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet) - Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/ https://unsigned.io/rnode/)
- maccam912 11mo agoWhat are those gripes? If I don't have anyone else who would use it, but would hang out in a public chat room, it didn't seem like reticulum was the right choice for that? You need destinations on things?
- bb88 11mo agoWe have a relatively dense meshtastic in my city, and yet I can't reliably send a message across to my friend, who would be 4 hops away. It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can do with ham radio.
- iberator 11mo agoYou must live in nyc or san Francisco lol
- NegativeLatency 11mo agoIt’s pretty dense in Portland and Seattle too, I’d image most of the bigger cities have a fairly large net
- bb88 11mo agoBoise, actually.
- PBnFlash 11mo agoIt seems like big cities get congested, on marginal systems the chances of only getting half the messages is very high. It really dosnt integrate with much else, the mqtt stuff seems unreliable. It does seem like the RNode radios are a lot less mature but they seem to be aiming to be less of a toy.
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- nunobrito 11mo agoDidn't got adoption because the code base is awful to work with and there is a trauma against bluetooth being used as a network path. Plus: encryption is heavy when bandwidth is limited and over radio waves we aren't even permitted to encrypt data most of the times. Please don't read my comment as bringing down the project. I'm a fan, used everything it was produced but ultimately is unusable for serious applications on the current state. I really tried hard to adopt it.
- sandos 11mo agoIf the reticulum code is worse than the meshtastic one, then it is truly atrocious. Been trying to get a specific board to simply "sleep" its radio using meshtastic, and nobody seems to know WHY it doesnt do it. The code is horrible spaghetti with lots of ifdefs. And nobody seems to know why things are the way they are in the code re: power handling. ChatGPT wrote me a brute force method that works, but its ugly and I dont want to maintain patches. But it is fairly easy to hack on. I have no idea how to debug things without USB serial connected, though.
- nunobrito 11mo agoSorry, can't really compare because I've never had to suffer looking at meshtastic source code. Quite tempted at this point to just throw the python implementation of reticulum at Claude and see if a validated port to C++ is possible. Maybe a bit offtopic and not LoRa, but I've been looking at ESP32 and they include an ESPMesh for the WiFi radio with a promise of about 500 to 1000 meters range from what I read. It isn't the same range as LoRa, but it is "larger" bandwidth and for the price of 3 dollars per unit seems promising on urban areas to connect people. I'm trying it out now.
- anthk 11mo agoNomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a 80x24 terminal and 16 colors. Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework. Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays. And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
- greesil 11mo agoFirst I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now. Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.
- MerrimanInd 11mo agoMeshcore is another alternative. I haven't done a deep dive into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic issues. https://meshcore.co.uk/ https://meshcore.co.uk/
- izme 11mo agoOne of the main differences with MeshCore is that client nodes don't repeat messages, only dedicated repeater nodes repeat with the idea that they should be placed in more ideal locations. Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you.
- sschueller 11mo agoSad to see open source communities being so insecure that they feel threatened by an alternative project. Both can coexist and competition is good.
- RobotToaster 11mo agoThe Meshtastic community is almost as toxic as the ham radio one.
- mystraline 11mo ago> Just don't mention MeshCore anywhere around Meshtastic, or they'll kickban you. Thats not the problem. And Ive also mentioned Meshcore as well on their discord with no threats of banning or anything of the sort. Ive also seen people come in the group, with "Meshtastic sucks and Meshcore is best", and the worst by admins was 'we have no problem discussing but that tone was overly harsh'. Liam Kottle, the head of Meshcore ran the first Meshtastic map from grabbed MQTT data. However, he was grabbing and saving everything, including public channels, direct messages, GPS, telemetry. Everything. 1.5y ago, people were going to his map and snooping on Defcon Meshtastic DM's, since even 1 node who reported MQTT would send everything. And then, DMs were simply filtered by the UI, but were effectively encrypted by the same shared key. Normally there was a general expectation that the data was ephemeral. Liam basically created and caused this data problem by saving and making available everything sent to MQTT. Meshtastic devs ended up having to tighten down the public MQTT broker a bunch. They also made the client on phones be more restrictive what was done and sent to MQTT. Also made "OK to forward MQTT" flag in the data packets too. And 2.5 introduced PKI TOFU for direct messages to prevent leakage. Aside the personnel difficulties, the technical issues with Meshcore are similar at node capacity too. Messages still dont get delivered near capacity. Core requires infrastructure nodes. Its more like APRS+LoRa than anything like a mesh.
- snickerer 11mo agoMeshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems. Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio. Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).
- nunobrito 11mo agoExactly my thoughts. Reticulum feels like an eternal "one day will be great" project but we keep waiting and waiting.
- anthk 11mo agoReticulum and Nomadnet should have been rewritten in Golang long ago.
- sandos 11mo agoAfter playing with meshtastic and seeing some packet-loss stats for LoRa in general, I would never even try reticulum. Sounds very, very painful.
- curcbit 11mo agoreticulum cannot scale, it's not topology aware and has no congestion management