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Comment by 0x62 | Hacker News Reader

Huge 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)

- NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)

- Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)

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Didn'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.

If 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.

Sorry, 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.

What 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?

We 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.

You must live in nyc or san Francisco lol

It’s pretty dense in Portland and Seattle too, I’d image most of the bigger cities have a fairly large net

Boise, actually.

It 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.

Nomadnet 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.

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