Comment by 🚀 lars_the_bear
Re: "Just stumbled into the Reticulum / Nomadnet project…"
I very much like the idea of Nomadnet over LoRa. The problem is that, even more than Internet-type technologies, it depends on there being a sufficient density of users in your neighbourhood to sustain the mesh. It's a great idea, though.
Feb 23 · 2 months ago
12 Later Comments ↓
🍀 gritty [OP] · Feb 23 at 13:52:
@darkghost - ha it did take me a minute to find the right config to connect to something other than my home network. once you do, the peers start popping up.
I only know a little bit about LoRa - I'm checking out the protocol portion to see what it's about.
👻 darkghost · Feb 23 at 15:07:
I know more about LoRa. In general you should think of it in terms of dialup speeds. And early ones at that. It reaches very far on low power but only at about 1 kbps. And far in this case is relative. It's impressive for 900 MHz and 0.1-1 watt. Where people get reasonable distances is through repeating. Meshtastic does up to 7 repeats (or hops) and enables communication over nearly 100 miles. Meshcore does the same with routing up to 64 hops. All low speed. Reticulum can run by itself or encapsulated in things like Meshtastic. You're more likely to have a Meshtastic network near you than a Reticulum LoRa network. Airtime is finite and can be easily congested at these speeds.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Feb 23 at 16:06:
Congestion isn't a problem in my neighbourhood (rural Hertfordshire) -- there's just no interest in this kind of technology, so far as I can see. On a good day I can reach one or two MeshCore nodes; nothing on Meshtastic at all. I'd be willing to put up a repeater, if I thought anybody could reach it. Shame, because it's a fascinating technology.
I've set up a Raspberry Pi with Reticulum that connects to several Internet nodes. The speeds are low, but it actually gets quite a bit of online traffic. The only parts of Reticulum I still struggle with are how to manage identities and integrate connections into other applications.
Unfortunately, I also have no nearby peers to connect to via radio; I live in a rural area, and many people don't bother with technology beyond a stock smartphone and the occasional Netflix subscription.
👻 darkghost · Feb 23 at 19:57:
I'm barely on a Meshtastic network to a wider area thanks to an unlisted repeater. Reticulum is out of the question here in the sticks.
❤️ fairlygood · Feb 23 at 21:27:
I not looked into other LoRA networks, but I do have a MeshCore repeater running. It’s fun, but limited use. I can chat on it, and.. well that’s it. I’d like to see someone do something useful with it.
❤️ fairlygood · Feb 23 at 21:29:
@lars_the_bear you’d be surprised at how much difference just one repeater at reasonably high ground can make.
🚀 ColonelThirtyTwo · Feb 23 at 23:33:
I recently got into meshtastic, so this is interesting to see.
🍀 gritty [OP] · Feb 23 at 23:52:
to be honest I was just interested in browsing the "pages" on the different nodes. seems the radio side of this struggles.
Yeah lack of local nodes makes it difficult for me to do much of anything on meshtastic or meshcore
🚀 lars_the_bear · Feb 24 at 15:43:
@fairlygoodthanks : sure. On the rare occasions I can reach the cluster of activity in NW London, I can get good coverage. But I don't have the money or the time to put up my own repeater, in the hope that somebody else witin range will join me one day. I guess that's the problem we all have, out in the sticks.
my understanding is that reticulums strength is not that it runs over LoRa, but that it can transport data across any low-throughput medium (LoRa, bluetooth, wifi, packet radio in theory) very efficiently with low bandwidth & power requirements.
design-wise, the idea is that you can reach someone regardless of how they are connected, that it can store and forward later if your recipient is disconnected, and that the protocol enforces real E2E encryption.
since the protocols (reticulum + lxmf) are so generic, a lot can be built on top of them (like nomadnet)
i run a nomadnet node. there isn't much on it right now...
Original Post
Just stumbled into the Reticulum / Nomadnet project tonight. I'm still bumbling my way around but it seems interesting and very gemini-esque, especially with the terminal interface of Nomadnet. I see there's a gemini proxy as well.