In my opinion:
Meshtastic is MUCH easier to set up. Reticulum is very difficult to set up and requires a lot of time/work at the moment.
Reticulum has a lot of potential for more protocols, networking, apps, etc…
Meshtatic is very much made for messages and finding nodes.
Both work with LoRa.
Ive played around with both and was more successful with meshtastic (and meshcore). But Reticulum impressed me because I could send images over LoRa and could work with just about any networking. Which was interesting!
This is a good video showcasing RNode/Reticulum here: https://youtu.be/BsAMeMp1hlg?t=657
Looks like Reticulum is no longer being developed (creator essentially made it read only) and there’s no active forks.
It’s still being actively developed. There’s been multiple releases in just the last few weeks and all through the year. He’s just not posting immediately to github as he’s built-in git support over the reticulum network [0] and it seems that’s his primary way of releasing source updates.
Once you have
rnsinstalled [1] (and configured to connect to the broader network) you can run the following command to get the latest source files:# From the 1.3.4 release notes [0] rngit release rns://7649a50d84610232d1416b41d2896aff/reticulum/reticulum fetch latest:all --signer bc7291552be7a58f361522990465165cThat said, rns is mostly feature complete. Now its up to others to built tools/apps on top of the network. For anyone not aware, here’s some apps/tools to try/check out:
- Columba: Modern Android app that supports browsing nomadnet pages and chat.
- Nomad Network: Browse nomadnet pages, chat, group chat, host nomadnet pages, etc.
- Retipedia: Serve up wiki pages.
- Sideband: Swiss-army knife reticulum network Android app.
- MeshChatX: (appears to be down right now) - A GUI-oriented alternative to nomad network.
- rBrowser: Browse nomadnet pages.
- LXST Phone: - Make calls over rns!
Lastly, for anyone still reading, there’s a few ports being developed that are compatible with the python implementation:
- Reticulum-Go: A go implementation
- Leviculum: A rust implementation.
- Reticulum-rs: Another rust implementation.
[0] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/releases/tag/1.3.4
Interesting, thanks for letting me know. I thought it was still being developed but then found: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/MIRROR.md too bad. But I understand it. Its an ambitious project!
I found a fork here: https://codeberg.org/skyguy/retinet but no idea if its any good.
Statement: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1069
But I hope some skilled people take good care of it. Maybe on Codeberg this time.
I will keep my node running for now.
What is Reticulum? This is the first time I heard of it.
Theres MUCH more to it, but in nutshell it allows you to do TCP/IP/Internet things with LoRa. More info here: https://reticulum.network/
Its a network of networks.
I was able to communicate with another node via voice and images through LoRa. Its very useful if you are looking for more of a internet kind of mesaging system but VERY hard to set up (my opinion). Looks like the community made the heltecs work on it now which was fun to play around with.
You can see an example of this in the times link above.
Sounds like Reticulum is what you need for an actual decentralized internet, while Meshtastic is just a messenger service.
I think thats what they were going for. And it seems to function that way.
