Re: "Thoughts on nomadnet as gemini competitor?"

In: s/SmallWeb

I barely know that other smallweb (or textnet I'll call it that since you know, it's not the web) protocols do exist.

I think a better way to make a protocol is to indeed use an easier markup language, I only think of Reformatted Text, Markdown, HTML 3.0, Wikitext, Gemtext, and Gophermap if we are talking about those. The nomadnet one would be a lot of getting used to.

Also, can we stop (not totally) with the Python scripting for the server-client structure? I know it's easier but I think it's a bit far fetched for the language. Though I would say that as a guy unfamiliar with Python...

🎮 lucss21a

2025-02-02 · 1 year ago

Poll Results

1. nomadnet rocks

████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 19%

2. nomadnet rocks but not as gemini competitor

█████████████████▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 70%

3. nomadnet sucks

███▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 11%

27 votes were cast.

43 Later Comments ↓

🌲 byte [OP] · 2025-02-02 at 01:38:

if hating on python was an olympic sport, I'd be a champion

🐝 undefined · 2025-02-02 at 03:24:

The thing is, protocol doesn't matter really. What matters is that it's not compatible, so there's some (not that much ofc) filtering in terms of who uses it, so the community is smaller, not necessarily the protocol or the markup language. The benefit is, you get to know people individually instead of just looking at which emojis they use in the bio or something ridiculous like that. There are other ways of doing it too, like having a forum that's centered around something that's not interesting to most people, like chemistry for example. One other thing that used to be a lot more popular is invite-only forums. There are some problems particular to them which is why people don't do it as

much now but you get the point. The protocol being simple is good if you want to make your own server or a client, but it has little effect on the quality of the conversation. If anything, this focus on particular technology just makes people talk about protocols all the time which is not that interesting.

🐐 Singletona082 · 2025-02-02 at 05:40:

Going to be blunt? In Concept i love nomadnet. In appearance it looks amazing for a command line app. From the perspective of 'hey we need to get people on rammped onto the service to generate content to go 'hey look at what we have?' It's garbage. It's literally using tagging and coding that you see in MUDs and the like. Plus with how it is structured there is no way to get a graphical client, or even something like lagrange where the protocol is very 'one rrequest one response' but the client makes it all pretty.

And that I fear is why reticulum is failing. They have neat ideas but theyr'e so far up nerd hyperfocus theyr'e discounting the needs of normal peopl.

🚀 teekay · 2025-02-02 at 06:15:

Don't conflate Nomadnet with Reticulum. Just like Gemini invented a new protocol (for good reasons), Reticulum invented a new network stack, and Nomadnet is only an example application running on the network stack. Python was chosen for prototyping speed, will be re-written in a systems lang now that it's stable. I think Gemini over Reticulum would be the dream future, because Reticulum is a lot more efficient than TCP/IP (less than 300 bytes for encrypted connection vs 10kb for TCP), however since Reticulum already does encryption, I'd probably prefer to see Spartan on there than Gemini. It's really fascinating to dig into Reticulum itself, check out the Reticulum talk from 38c3, well worth it.

🐐 Singletona082 · 2025-02-02 at 13:12:

Mercury then might be a better option. AKA Gemini but with its native TLS stripped out. Biggest issue I see is 'how do we link to any content on other nodes? Or is this going to be a lot of content islands who's only pointers in/out will be pointers to other islandsrather than content on those islands?

🚀 stack · 2025-02-02 at 13:58:

From up above, Gemini is gemtext, which is very close to plaintext. Elaborate tagging markup is a hard sell. Even Markdown gets convoluted beyond basic usage. Especially off-grid/shtf situation where there us no time/opportunit to read docs, etc.

Client certificates are great.

Encryption and transport may be swapped, but sorry, not for something written in the most unstable, big and slow language in the world -- even to test things out publicly.

If it's the only language you know that allows rapid prototyping, I am doubtful that anything good can come of this (and maybe gently suggest to learn Lisp instead of rolling out protocols). But hey, stranger things have happened.

🌲 byte [OP] · 2025-02-02 at 15:12:

@stack exactly. I'm tempted to try and write a rust node out of spite, but my eyes bleed when I read all that pythin code, and it's pretty convoluted. So it's definitely not "KISS" as gemini and its ecosystem

🚀 stack · 2025-02-02 at 19:10:

In my experience, 'prototyping in language A to later convert to language B' never works - you get stuck with the 'conveniences' of the language you start with, and get locked in, requiring a complete rewrite anyway.

Now I am all for rewrites -- the first pass to figure out what to do, the second pass to figure out how, and the third one to fix all the embarrassing things you should've known better but figured you'd deal with later (they seem like small things but often require changing everything).

If you really want to do the first pass in python or whatever, go for it, but it will not be the basis for a smooth transition into the final compiled code, and no one should see it except the core team anyway. I certainly don't want to see it.

🚀 me · 2025-02-02 at 19:50:

gemtext or micron pages... both is simple and you get into it in less than 15minutes.... 🤷

you could code markdown support instead of criticize a 'missing' feature.

we also need some kind of search engine and something like newswaffle.. lets see it pragmatic:

its just amazing to be able to create resilient networks with everthing which can TX/RX... this is the potential and we should discuss about how to combine things instead of putting negative energy into new, foss technologies... together we are strong!

edit (answer of mark, the maker of rericulum):

I absolutely **love** markdown, and use it for practically everything. Yes I do the dishes in markdown.

The reason I created Micron for nomadnet pages, and didn't just use markdown, is that it was completely **not** designed for terminal emulators. There's no support for stuff like foreground and background colors. No support for text-alignment, even centering a block of text is missing. And it can't handle ASCII/UTF-8 "graphics" very well :( Ok, nomadnet Micron still has a few issues there, with some characters being interpreted as markup, but at least that can be fixed relatively easily with a "text graphics" tag or something.

🐐 Singletona082 · 2025-02-02 at 19:59:

Theoretically 'you' could, but I'm all thumbs at code. I'm sorry if I seem overly confrontational, but Reticulum has struck me as somewhere that doesn't want to grow and offer more things. To me it lookedl ike it settled on this nomad thing and that's that so I just kinda shrugged and went 'OK.'

👻 darkghost · 2025-02-02 at 20:31:

My smooth brain can't make reticulum work for me. Nor do I get why it exists. The python stack is too fat to run on the minimalist hardware where it would really shine.

So if the use case is off-grid or shtf, taking something complicated with a butt load of deps seems to be antithetical. Better off with a TCP mesh since there's very lean code that can run on 8 bit microcontrollers, tons of supported hardware you probably have in your pocket, and everyone has enough familiarity to not need docs. Emcomms does this, where information flow is life and death. But I probably don't get it.

🌲 byte [OP] · 2025-02-02 at 20:34:

anyway here's me trying this nomadnet thing:

13e20709346338900d8b380309f8cbbf:/page/index.mu

I found a way how to avoid dealing with all those escape characters and inconvenient markup symbols that mix into the text and make it hard to understand when you try to edit it - I defined a bunch of aliases and functions in bash and just serve pages as if it's an "immediate UI" like ImGUI.

It's a solution, I guess 🤷

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-02 at 22:22:

thank you so much.

🌲 byte [OP] · 2025-02-02 at 22:43:

@norayr not sure who's this addressed to but shnorhakalutyun nonetheless xD

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-03 at 22:00:

byte, yes, it was to hanzbrix, for not understanding python. (:

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-07 at 00:13:

i was reading about reticulum and i find yggdrasil much more attractive.

and it is written in go: modern, simple (simplest in mainstream) compiled fast language.

can use ipv6 natively or even if you don't dave ipv6 it'll assign you ipv6 of its own. that address won't change when u move and obtain different ips in different places.

you can ret everything over it, even xmpp if desirable, gemini, http, or distcibuted tox, or ipfs, or just nfs, or appletalk, or just do a netcat chat with your friend, if you know their ip.

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-07 at 00:15:

yggdrassil will find adjust a routing table when u move and change isps. amnd even offline it can autodiscover available nodes.

doesn't need bootstrap servers.

🌲 byte [OP] · 2025-02-08 at 01:06:

@norayr yep I know, messed around with yggdrasil before. But honestly you got some impressive nerdy knowledge hehe /pos

Too bad i'm not in Armenia anymore, maybe we could have a couple of Dargetts

🚀 digler · 2025-02-10 at 14:26:

I'd like to add a 4th vote option for 'please don't force a site-wide poll for this sort of thing'

🚀 stack · 2025-02-10 at 14:57:

Make it 4 for me too. It's much more interesting to see people's comments than stats. Polls are better in larger settings, and better yet not at all

🌆 skyjake [mod...] · 2025-02-10 at 16:45:

You can go to your notification settings and disable new poll notifications, if you don't want to participate in polls.

🚀 stack · 2025-02-10 at 16:48:

@skyjake -- does that just keep poll posts from my feed? Looking at this thread, there are some interesting comments I would not want to miss, necessarily.

It's easy enough not to respond to the poll -- I think we are just being grumpy.

🌆 skyjake [mod...] · 2025-02-10 at 18:41:

@stack That will not keep poll posts from your feed. It will only disable the site-wide notifications about polls.

🚀 digler · 2025-02-12 at 01:40:

I'll change those settings and rely on browsing the site for interesting content as I have done up to this point.

I hope it didn't come off as excessively grumpy, I'm just self-centered and thought someone was mentioning or replying to me :)

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-14 at 11:52:

heh, i dont drink alcohol, but specialty coffee would be good. (:

🐙 norayr · 2025-02-14 at 11:58:

meanwhile i tried pidgin + bonjour over yggdrasil and chatted with my friend. we also managed to exchange files with pidgin.

i am so excited i am writing a xep-0174 crossplatform messenger in pascal.

🦀 Proton · 2025-10-19 at 20:36:

I just got into reticulum this week. I don't get the impression nomadnet and gemini are solving the same problem. I think reticulum is doing something new, and gemini is doing something old. Using rnsh to ssh into my home LAN from my phone hotspot at work with no port forwarding is very sick.

And what's with the python slander? I implemented 2 different network based protocols (eg kademlia) in python and they work great. It's not high frequency trading. Reticulum is already deployed in the wild so clearly there isn't a problem.

I built a nomadnet page in a day with Scheme so you can pick your favorite language for running nodes with some server side logic.

👻 darkghost · 2025-10-19 at 23:06:

The python slander comes from its nature as an interpreted language (slower execution), breakage between minor revisions (changing minor versions on a Linux system will result in an unusable system), and breakage in the entire language from major revisions (eg Python 2 vs Python 3.) I wrote some software in Python for my job 10 years ago and it doesn't have a prayer in executing now. It was in Python 2 using libraries that were never migrated to Python 3. It didn't take long for it to become useless.

Meanwhile I can take C code from the 80s and still compile it.

So Python code is good for right now as long as it has active development and you keep your environment up to date.

🦀 Proton · 2025-10-19 at 23:35:

Python2 has been obsolete since 2008

🐙 norayr · 2025-10-19 at 23:57:

@darkghost with all dislike towards python that i have, it isn't that true that you can take c code from 80ies and still compile it.

look, here is the

— historical code for lilith emulator from 1983

It is now quite impossible to get this running again under a recent C compiler or a recent system. No ANSI C compiler will accept this code and even if everything gets tweaked such that it is accepted, it still won't run because there exist far too many portability issues. The emulator depends on an evaluation order generated by the K&R compiler at multiple occassions which, however, was never guaranteed by C.

👻 darkghost · 2025-10-20 at 00:01:

Hence the criticism. Python 2 is gone. Software continued to be released until the end of life of Python 2. In my case, the libraries dated to 2006. It takes resources and time to rewrite software. In this case, something wasn't available to bring them up to Python 3. And, it being not my job to write software, I stopped doing that task and replaced it with nothing.

🐙 norayr · 2025-10-20 at 00:03:

then it continues:

The only method to get this code running is to compile and run it under an emulator for this ancient architecture using an installation of UNIX Edition VII which is fortunately now freely available.

i tried to port it to modern c and it was so hard that i decided to rewrite it instead in oberon.

— /u/norayr/image/601.png

though it is an offtopic i was able to compile with modern oberon compiler lots of historical code, even by just preparing wrapper module XYPlane to run this Tetris on Linux and X11 instead of Oberon system.

👻 darkghost · 2025-10-20 at 00:44:

1983 predates the attempts to standardize C but I take your point humbly. ANSI C dates to 89 and maybe if I wasn't a snot nosed kid back then, maybe I'd be complaining about it too and advocating for COBOL.

🐙 norayr · 2025-10-21 at 00:22:

heh (:

🐙 norayr · 2025-10-21 at 00:26:

i just thought and checked, turbo pascal's initial release was on november 20, 1983.

the dialect is supported in freepascal. so heh, if the code doesn't talk directly to ega/vga memory and doesn't do specific dos things, should be compilable today with fpc and should run under modern linux. (:

🐙 norayr · 2025-10-21 at 00:27:

otherwise it should run under freedos.

🚀 stack · 2025-10-22 at 02:00:

In my experience when something sucks, it is because of python. Slow, big, weird, downloads god knows what from god knows where, breaks Linux if you try to get rid of it _or_ upgrade it without a weird version management system.

As a language, horrible in so many ways -- syntax, indentation, no tail calls optimization...

Some people can deal with it, but it makes me sick. Some people don't mind being in debt, but it likewise makes me sick... If you can manage, good on you but I will stay away

🚀 stack · 2025-10-22 at 04:46:

BTW, you can totally run Common Lisp code from the 80's, the standard was set back then and never changed

🚀 devoid · 2025-10-22 at 13:27:

To all the Python bemoaners here I have but one question: Please show them how it should be done instead of caterwauling about what is

🚀 stack · 2025-10-22 at 18:27:

@devoid: See Common Lisp.

Standardized in 1980s, never needed to be 'updated'. No syntax to speak of. Well studied, all quirks written about last century. Dozens of implementations, some faster than C. Real macros for serious coders. Real lambdas (that is where they came from, along with most of so-called computer science), real closures, real symbols, amazing oo system if you choose to use it, packages, build systems, and best of all, it is a programmable language that can manipulate code as any other data.

🚀 devoid · 2025-10-22 at 22:42:

You don't have to show *me* @stack, I know Lisp and I know full well what it can and cannot do.

Show **Them**. Build a Reticulum implementation that brings to the fore what you would like to see and leaves out what bothers you.

Hell, why not build a better Python?

If it's worth your time to complain about something then it's worth your time to improve it or build something better, don't you think?

🚀 stack · 2025-10-23 at 00:28:

I am not complaining -- just answering why there is a negative attitude toward python.

As for reticulum -- I have no idea what it is, but as it is written in python, I will never use it.

And to build a better python.,.. Why? People think it's great, so it must be doing it for them. I don't even know what it means to build a better python. It's like building a better fascist state, or a better fart.

🐙 norayr · Mar 12 at 18:17:

i tried it, it got me 300mb of python libs. and it all for, practically, just running a webapp chat, which i wasn't able to make to work. this one probably because i don't understand how it works. but still, 300 (it was more) mbs of python for what?

yggdrasil binaries are about 5-7 mb in installers.

just checked, yggdrasil binary in my computer - 11mb, yggdrasilctl - 7. close to the minimal code size go produces, i guess.

🌒 s/SmallWeb

🌲 byte:

Thoughts on nomadnet as gemini competitor? — I've spent almost the whole day researching reticulum and nomadnet, and here are my thoughts: I initially was interested in it to see how hard it is to host your own pages over it, configure and connect to the whole thing. However, the whole stack is written primarely in python (that scares me in terms of reliability because no offence but python is a trash language for that purpose), and clients are bretty basic. There's no search on page...

💬 46 comments · 5 likes · 2025-02-01 · 1 year ago · #nomadnet 🗳️ #reticulum