HN user
that map on rmap.world is only showing nodes that run dicoverable=yes in their configurations or something like that.
based upon the announce stream coming through my local node, i am seeing around 14k unique identities advertising over 21k unique application endpoints (destinations) over the course of the past month or so that i’ve been tracking it.
because the protocol is transport agnostic, there are a lot of interfaces to the public reticulum net that you can access over TCP, I2P, or yggdrasil.
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Community-Node-L...
takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.
don’t forget that although it already works fine on lora, it’s a protocol that’s transport channel agnostic, and is gonna do great with other transports (halow, optical, wifi, whatever) when people finally start realizing that lora is never going to be able to keep up with bandwidth/speed requirements of anything much beyond simple text messaging.
although, i’ve already done real time voice calls over 1 hop of reticulum lora on and it works pretty ok.
edit - community wiki with getting started instructions is here:
i like it a lot, being agnostic to communication channel sets it apart from the lora only meshes. it’s cool to be able to use a mesh device to communicate with people who are both on and off the mainline internet seamlessly.
and there’s some cool stuff happening on nomadnet as well l
oh yeah and there’s a voice chat protocol that works over lora, too
it’s a bummer, but according to folks in the matrix chat, he’s still developing and in touch with some of the community devs.
meshtastic is chat and lora only. its protocol is super inefficient and unreliable, and only can handle a maximum of 7 hops across the mesh.
all users need to be running the reticulum network stack to be able to send, receive, and route packets.
reticulum itself describes the network stack (like tcp/ip) and it has its own protocols like LXMF for messaging and LXST for streaming. applications can be built on top of these protocols.
it’s different than IP, instead of addresses, each node has an identity that’s a cryptographic key pair that you send messages to, the routing happens in the background regardless of network topology or diversity of link types.
you CAN send reticulum packets over a TCP/IP adapter and thus across the normal Internet (there are a lot of testnet and community nodes that are accessed this way), but the protocol also seamlessly bridges over any interface (lora, bluetooth, HAM radio, etc) that is attached to the node.
so like, there could be a message sent over lora to a base station that relays it to another server through the internet, then that server sends it out over a ham radio link to another computer somewhere else, etc.
all the message sender has to know is the pubkey of the node they want to talk to, and the network figures out how to establish a link.
128 hops maximum.
the prerolled binaries of the aforementioned software include the network stack and easy enough presets to find content from other nodes and people to talk to.
it hit version 1.0.0 this summer and it works!
to get started easily, check out meshchat:
https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-meshchat
or sideband on android:
https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband
you can already send photos and voice chat over lora, and when lora runs out of bandwidth or if there’s no link, the protocol can seamlessly go over any other link type.
check out reticulum and nomadnet, they meet these needs perfectly!
there’s still quite a lot of chat in the element group, active github projects, the “official” stack hit v1.0.0 this summer, and it works.
him stepping away might slow things a little but there’s already enough functional stuff and actively maintained nomadnet pages that i’m frankly surprised at how few people have heard of this project.
I was an organizer of Solid back in the day, and it was one of the most fun things I have been involved in. RIP....
you better get over there soon, the HQB markets are closing and rapidly being replaced by consumer-oriented products and massive shopping malls!
rent is high and many of the vendors are moving out to dongguan, guangzhou, or fully online.