9 ms·

The Zen of Reticulum

101 points by mikece 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
barishnamazov 9mo ago
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273
citizenfishy 9mo ago
Middle out
jna_sh 9mo ago
Good to see recent writings and changes, I had taken from the December 2025 blog post that the maintainer was done: https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html
orbifold 9mo ago
At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI generated content and human content that we will stop using the Internet and it will be left to bots.
- rednafi 9mo ago
  Dead internet theory [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
  - immibis 9mo ago
    Personally I'm waiting for the "everyone is 12 internet theory" to get a Wikipedia page. (Of course I am - I'm 12) non-wikipedia garbage site reference: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-193144275.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-19314...
MarsIronPI 9mo ago
Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed to harm humans" prevents it from being used in e.g. militia groups in oppressed countries who may wish to use it to harm humans in self-defense.
- IncreasePosts 9mo ago
  It's such a strange and unfortunate addition to the project. Also, what's the point of assuming every entity is potentially hostile? Can't you just put in the license "you're not allowed to be malicious or hostile on this network"?
  - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    That's still a restriction on freedom. Some people's notion of malicious might disagree with the author's.
  - subscribed 9mo ago
    Just read the manifest. GP used intentionally hostile and weird interpretation of "if you intend to subdue, enslave or kill, don't use it", aimed at dictatorships, organisations like Palantir, etc.
    - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
      What? If I'm in a militia group that resists oppressive governments, I intend to kill people. Therefore I'm not allowed to use Reticulum to coordinate with my mates, even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally.
      - ComputerGuru 9mo ago
        > even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally. They’d only agree in the abstract. As soon as you name the oppressive regime you’re fighting against, suddenly a huge chunk of those people will come up with reasons to no longer support you.
drob518 9mo ago
I’ve looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I suspect each of them has major scaling issues. Sure, mesh networks are great because they are more resilient, but if you trust nobody and you have no sense of a route to a destination, you’re left with flooding as your primary next-hop selection method, which means you’re going to be about as scalable as an old Microsoft LAN Manager network was in 1995 (which is to say not very). Short of reading the code, does any sort of protocol documentation (or better yet, analysis) exist for Reticulum? Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reticulum%20Manual.pdf https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...
- AyyEye 9mo ago
  Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.
  - wredcoll 9mo ago
    Design goals are great. How do they actually achieve it?
    - AyyEye 9mo ago
      Not with flood routing.
      - drob518 9mo ago
        Yes, you said. You’ve been very helpful in telling us how it doesn’t work.
DataDaoDe 9mo ago
> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled. The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm working on trying to solve some of this - well, at least build alternatives for people). and this: > The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite. Seems to be implying (as well as in other places) that this was all coordinated or planned in some way, but I've looked into how it came to be this way and I grew up with it, and for me, I think a lot of it stemmed from good intentions (the ethos that information should be free, etc.) I made a short video recently on how we got to a centralized and broken internet, so here's a shameless plug if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs
- AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works
  - perching_aix 9mo ago
    Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate? I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its totality?]". One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated they are compared to others, or fall victim to the consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness, and similarly little substantiation.
    - 9mo ago
alnwlsn 9mo ago
Philosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and I could probably figure it out, but some user who actually needs this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about this, but it is a little ironic. Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).
- drob518 9mo ago
  Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you’re going to need to download the source code and a compiler. I’m not much a Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn’t seem particularly bad. But I’m probably missing your point.
  - alnwlsn 9mo ago
    My goal is to be able to do all steps of the typical Meshtastic youtube tutorial without access to the internet. I like to liken it to my other hobby of retrocomputing. In the old days, your whole OS and all the applications ran from a few floppies and a couple of books for documentation. If you need to duplicate the environment, just make copies of your disks. And of course you need an original set to start with. But nobody thinks of that as "offline", that's just the normal way it works, and yet it seems more offline than modern projects who claim to be offline.
    - appplication 9mo ago
      If you’re pip installing you can just toss your venv on a floppy/cd/flash whatever if you’re so inclined. I’m not sure I understand the concern. The need for internet is a sliding scale with your own resourcefulness.
snickerer 9mo ago
I love that Mark Qvist publishes his strong opinion, view of the world, and goals. It quite smells like the hacker spirit of the 80s, mixed with a little spiritualism and anarchism. Very refreshing after so many other people are just disillusioned, worn out, angry, or frightened.
alexjplant 9mo ago
> The mental maps we carry are dominated by a single, misleading image: The Cloud. > To break free of the center, you must also let go of the concept of the "Address". When I was still dealing primarily with on-prem networks in regulated environments (or cloud networks stubbornly architected in a fashion similar to on-prem ones) I worked with a lot of people that could not and would not ever understand this. It's not just a cloud thing. Some people just cling to using IP addresses for everything all the time. They don't understand why trying to access the JIRA server via IP wouldn't work because they didn't understand SNI let alone a Host Header. Dynamic record registration and default suffix settings are nothing more than a section of settings to be cruised over during clicked-in configuration. Zones can and should be split without regard for architecture or usage. Et cetera. My theory is that because these people didn't understand Layer 7 stuff like HTTP or DNS they just fall back to what they can look at in a console (Cisco ASA, AWS, or otherwise). IPv6 will simplify a lot of the NAT stuff but it won't cure these people of using network addresses as a crutch. Not really sure what the systemic solution is - I was like this once but was fortunate enough to be task with migrating a set of BIND servers to the cloud and so learned DNS by the seat of my pants. Maybe certification exams should emphasize this aspect of networking more.
anthk 9mo ago
Not much "Zen" when it barely works under i386 (Atom n270 CPU), 1GB of RAM and a simple 80x25 terminal. Sadly, even my usual one (100x32/36) isn't good enough to please retrowannabe hipsters.
ge96 9mo ago
Mentioning HAM-based internet is cool too eg. HamWAN Oh I guess that falls under packet radio I see
romperstomper 8mo ago
A nice citation in MIRROR.md - असतो मा सद्गमय तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय
bzmrgonz 8mo ago
i see this project more of a high security deployment. a sort of red phone network. in a post apocalypse scenario, we can do open networks on lora, plus at that time, we gonna need text manuals for agro, fabrication etc... essentially survival wikis.

101 points by mikece 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

barishnamazov 9mo ago

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273

citizenfishy 9mo ago

Middle out

jna_sh 9mo ago

Good to see recent writings and changes, I had taken from the December 2025 blog post that the maintainer was done: https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html

orbifold 9mo ago

At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI generated content and human content that we will stop using the Internet and it will be left to bots.

rednafi 9mo ago
Dead internet theory [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
- immibis 9mo ago
  Personally I'm waiting for the "everyone is 12 internet theory" to get a Wikipedia page. (Of course I am - I'm 12) non-wikipedia garbage site reference: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-193144275.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-19314...

MarsIronPI 9mo ago

Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed to harm humans" prevents it from being used in e.g. militia groups in oppressed countries who may wish to use it to harm humans in self-defense.

IncreasePosts 9mo ago
It's such a strange and unfortunate addition to the project. Also, what's the point of assuming every entity is potentially hostile? Can't you just put in the license "you're not allowed to be malicious or hostile on this network"?
- MarsIronPI 9mo ago
  That's still a restriction on freedom. Some people's notion of malicious might disagree with the author's.
- subscribed 9mo ago
  Just read the manifest. GP used intentionally hostile and weird interpretation of "if you intend to subdue, enslave or kill, don't use it", aimed at dictatorships, organisations like Palantir, etc.
  - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    What? If I'm in a militia group that resists oppressive governments, I intend to kill people. Therefore I'm not allowed to use Reticulum to coordinate with my mates, even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally.
    - ComputerGuru 9mo ago
      > even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally. They’d only agree in the abstract. As soon as you name the oppressive regime you’re fighting against, suddenly a huge chunk of those people will come up with reasons to no longer support you.

drob518 9mo ago

I’ve looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I suspect each of them has major scaling issues. Sure, mesh networks are great because they are more resilient, but if you trust nobody and you have no sense of a route to a destination, you’re left with flooding as your primary next-hop selection method, which means you’re going to be about as scalable as an old Microsoft LAN Manager network was in 1995 (which is to say not very). Short of reading the code, does any sort of protocol documentation (or better yet, analysis) exist for Reticulum? Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reticulum%20Manual.pdf https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...

AyyEye 9mo ago
Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.
- wredcoll 9mo ago
  Design goals are great. How do they actually achieve it?
  - AyyEye 9mo ago
    Not with flood routing.
    - drob518 9mo ago
      Yes, you said. You’ve been very helpful in telling us how it doesn’t work.

DataDaoDe 9mo ago

> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled. The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm working on trying to solve some of this - well, at least build alternatives for people). and this: > The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite. Seems to be implying (as well as in other places) that this was all coordinated or planned in some way, but I've looked into how it came to be this way and I grew up with it, and for me, I think a lot of it stemmed from good intentions (the ethos that information should be free, etc.) I made a short video recently on how we got to a centralized and broken internet, so here's a shameless plug if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works
- perching_aix 9mo ago
  Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate? I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its totality?]". One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated they are compared to others, or fall victim to the consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness, and similarly little substantiation.
  - 9mo ago

alnwlsn 9mo ago

Philosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and I could probably figure it out, but some user who actually needs this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about this, but it is a little ironic. Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).

drob518 9mo ago
Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you’re going to need to download the source code and a compiler. I’m not much a Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn’t seem particularly bad. But I’m probably missing your point.
- alnwlsn 9mo ago
  My goal is to be able to do all steps of the typical Meshtastic youtube tutorial without access to the internet. I like to liken it to my other hobby of retrocomputing. In the old days, your whole OS and all the applications ran from a few floppies and a couple of books for documentation. If you need to duplicate the environment, just make copies of your disks. And of course you need an original set to start with. But nobody thinks of that as "offline", that's just the normal way it works, and yet it seems more offline than modern projects who claim to be offline.
  - appplication 9mo ago
    If you’re pip installing you can just toss your venv on a floppy/cd/flash whatever if you’re so inclined. I’m not sure I understand the concern. The need for internet is a sliding scale with your own resourcefulness.

snickerer 9mo ago

I love that Mark Qvist publishes his strong opinion, view of the world, and goals. It quite smells like the hacker spirit of the 80s, mixed with a little spiritualism and anarchism. Very refreshing after so many other people are just disillusioned, worn out, angry, or frightened.

alexjplant 9mo ago

> The mental maps we carry are dominated by a single, misleading image: The Cloud. > To break free of the center, you must also let go of the concept of the "Address". When I was still dealing primarily with on-prem networks in regulated environments (or cloud networks stubbornly architected in a fashion similar to on-prem ones) I worked with a lot of people that could not and would not ever understand this. It's not just a cloud thing. Some people just cling to using IP addresses for everything all the time. They don't understand why trying to access the JIRA server via IP wouldn't work because they didn't understand SNI let alone a Host Header. Dynamic record registration and default suffix settings are nothing more than a section of settings to be cruised over during clicked-in configuration. Zones can and should be split without regard for architecture or usage. Et cetera. My theory is that because these people didn't understand Layer 7 stuff like HTTP or DNS they just fall back to what they can look at in a console (Cisco ASA, AWS, or otherwise). IPv6 will simplify a lot of the NAT stuff but it won't cure these people of using network addresses as a crutch. Not really sure what the systemic solution is - I was like this once but was fortunate enough to be task with migrating a set of BIND servers to the cloud and so learned DNS by the seat of my pants. Maybe certification exams should emphasize this aspect of networking more.

anthk 9mo ago

Not much "Zen" when it barely works under i386 (Atom n270 CPU), 1GB of RAM and a simple 80x25 terminal. Sadly, even my usual one (100x32/36) isn't good enough to please retrowannabe hipsters.

ge96 9mo ago

Mentioning HAM-based internet is cool too eg. HamWAN Oh I guess that falls under packet radio I see

romperstomper 8mo ago

A nice citation in MIRROR.md - असतो मा सद्गमय तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय

bzmrgonz 8mo ago

i see this project more of a high security deployment. a sort of red phone network. in a post apocalypse scenario, we can do open networks on lora, plus at that time, we gonna need text manuals for agro, fabrication etc... essentially survival wikis.