Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

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• Hacker News
• 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.
  by thataccount
• Try disabling the default AutoInterface in the config, that can cause problems due to some routers choking on UDP. If it still crashes anything, that's almost certainly a bug you can report
  by Panda_
• it'd be nice to see a comparison to rayfish.xyz
  by donpdonp
• It has nothing to do with that, like at all.
  by therein
• Maybe a better comparison is iroh.computer
  by highway900
• Different animal altogether.

  Rayfish, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netbird etc are a different category of tool, designed to facilitate connectivity between you and your own pool of machines. They don't generally do much in the way of multi-hop routing, but rather they orchestrate VPN tunnels on top of another routed network (like the internet).

  Reticulum would be better compared to Yggdrasil, cjdns etc as routing schemes for larger networks or true meshes, which can work independently of (and have no dependency upon) the internet.

  by neilalexander
• Unfortunately whenever I see the name, I am always reminded of part of the anatomy
  by FreezingKeeper
• I am not a native speaker, but I can't figure out what you are getting at. I have a hard time imagining you meant this:

  > The reticulum is the second chamber in the four-chamber alimentary canal of a ruminant mammal.

  I guess, on the internet nobody knows you're a ruminant mammal...

  by jijijijij
• I think it was named so for a reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endoplasmic_reticulum

  personally i find it a beautiful match

  by vindex10
• Curious what does it use for peer discovery ? Gossip protocol ?
  by dipanshuhappy
• 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.
  by Klaus23
• What's exactly the criticism you got? What do you miss?
  by jijijijij
• > 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?

  by Panda_
• Any publicly accessible protocol, such as Ethernet (wired and wireless) can only do so much to prevent DoS/DDoS on a given open multiple access medium.

  You can certainly bake in fairness, congestion control, etc. in the protocol level, but protocols require 2 participants to follow rules/spec to work, and if one side doesn't follow the rules/spec, at the very least some bandwidth will be consumed.

  The only way to absolutely prevent DoS/DDoS is to have more bandwidth than all possible simultaneous attackers, or limit physical access to the medium. Cellular networks, for example, keep direct physical access to its medium under tight lock and key through proprietary, non-open-source baseband firmware.

  by RiverCrochet
• 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??

  by kangaroozach
• What would be the benefit of not using tcp or http ? It is used only as a way to transport binary data.
  by ddrdrck_
• Mark accepts outside contributions over LXMF using git patches. The main communication method is over Reticulum Relay Chat using clients like NomadNet (made by Mark, unintuitive but works well) which is basically IRC and is purely sending messages to everyone in that channel at that time and is centralised around self hosted servers.
  by Panda_
• Was also the name of the internet in Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
  by thisisauserid
• One of my favorite books that I have yet to convince any of my friends to read. So many cool ideas explored.
  by KneeAwn
• Haha I immediately looked for this comment and wondered if the name was inspired by Anathem.
  by SilverSlash
• Yes it is.

  With the Artificial Inanity systems and the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies (ROBE) beginning to spew tremendous amounts of crap (a technical term) onto the Ret, things are getting tricky for us ITA.

  by ashton314
• 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.

  by the__alchemist
• Reticulum uses attached LoRa devices, via USB for example if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't directly run on the LoRa devices.

  PC not really required. 512MB of RAM and enough Linux to get Python will run Reticulum, on Raspberry Pi's for example.

  by RiverCrochet
• I think that unlike Meshtastic or Meshcore, this one is transport agnostic.
  by RRRA
• There's a LoRa firmware at https://github.com/attermann/microReticulum_Firmware which looks to be fairly well supported
  by Panda_
• 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).

  by snickerer
• > 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.

  by Gigachad
• it isn’t
  by 405nm
• reticulum don't just propagate over lora. IT can practically propagate over anything it supports (network, lora, bluetooth, etc).
  by tehlike
• Reticulum packets include a hop count of how many nodes it’s been through (to prevent packets looping indefinitely) and the destination address. Two way links use tables on each node to reverse the route back to the origin and don’t use origin addresses.

  The worst part privacy wise could be the announce packets which include a hop count and the address for the origin so if you had enough interfaces you could roughly say where a node is on a network graph (geo locating that is an entire other problem)

  Privacy also depends on what interfaces you communicate over, eg TCP reveals IP addresses to the nodes you directly connect to (combine with hop counts to see if a packet definitely originated from that node), LoRa gives an idea of how close it might be because of its range limits and the fact radio emissions can be located.

  by Panda_