Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

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.

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

> 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.

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.

edit: The core problem isn't so much that it requires Python and a GPOS; it's that they don't publish a spec, and instead direct you to use their Python package; the code is the spec is another way of phrasing that.

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

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

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.

I have a lot of hopes for Reticulum, but my experience has been that it is not widely deployed and really requires network-connected LoRa nodes to be worthwhile. As a pure LoRa protocol, I think MeshCore and Meshtastic are more useful, and while Meshcore has a better design of the two, Meshtastic by far has more adoption/critical mass.

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

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?

Curious what does it use for peer discovery ? Gossip protocol ?

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

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.

I have also put some thought to this problem and after reading some here are my definitive conclusions that still remain for all mesh networks to achieve:

- We need hardware that solves radio mesh problems:

  - Multifrequency (more than 8 bands and frequencies with different range) with programmable hopping between them (as opposed to LoRa default hopping which is random). I will use LoRa hardware for now on 169MHz to increase range and force frequency change in a non-random way. Still as mentioned LoRa rules cannot scale so we will have to build it in a non scalable manner and then change the limitations if adoptions ensues.

  - The radios need to be able to receive on many frequencies at the same time, atleast for the stem nodes.

- We need glue between old sync. IP/TCP/UDP (HTTP/SMTP/DNS) and async. IP2/"events" as he calls them.

- To scale geographical position is paramount and to remain independent of GPS we can use trilateration.

- The debate about encryption is a problem because it will have to evolve and to hardcode it into the base protocol will cause big disruptions down the road. I suggest the base layer is open and you apply encryption at the end; the reason for this is that privacy deters scalability and I prefer to have a truly scalable system that knows your position than the other way around. (also less chance the network can be used for military purposes then)

The resolution of range negotiation also has to be very granular: One freq. has to be the main "I'm here" channel and then dependent on density you have to releagate nodes to smaller and smaller range frequencies because a large city needs to cover a density of many thousand nodes per square kilometer.

So 169MHz is a good starting point (for range and less hops to reach bridge nodes) but you eventually need 433 and 868 too in the same device the main problem then becomes the antennas!!

To aim for complete decentralization over only radio is probably too optimistic, we could aim for distributed centralized independent networks instead with fiber interop so that mail and very simple web works on the base implementation to give immediate usability.

Finally a note on privacy, Tox is the only usable network that tried this and ohboy is it difficult to get any normal human being to adopt it when they have WhatsApp that has all humans on it allready.

To me unencrypted SMTP is a better attack vector because it is even more widespread and can be encrypted very easily later. Except of course destination encryption which works against scalability as I said previously.

The final reason I'm putting more energy into MMOs is that radio is easily disrupted and so far our existing internet show little technical reasons to abandon it yet. That can change in a heartbeat though.

Edit: Receiving my first meshtastic hardware for the C64 in a week or so but I still believe nobody has solved the scalability yet. I will eventually try to over at http://radiomesh.org

A Reticulum destination is a hash of a public key, so the address and the identity are the same object. That makes rotation awkward. There is no obvious path from a compromised key to the same reachable name. Lose the identity file and the address is gone.