Having looked at things like this before (including Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is that it’s carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very appealing.
Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi, laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that actually handles network traffic.
Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally require a companion device to use most of their functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this stage.
I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
But doesn't carrier agnostic in this context mean that it is very hard to coordinate with people to have compatible hardware?
A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi as the physical layer.
And then add in more esoteric stuff like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
Maybe, but if you want to connect networks between two nearby towns for example, it’d be nice to be able to run that off commodity hardware that’s a bit higher-bandwidth than what you’ll get on LoRa.
And realistically I suspect that people using it for the same sort of use cases they’d use Meshtastic for will be using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.
“My knowlegde about Meshtastic is a bit limited, so I might get some details wrong, but from what I understand, Meshtastic is more or less an application. It is focused on carrying out a single task well, in a way that is easy to understand and deploy, but that also means that it will not really do anything else than that task, and stop working well if you push it close to, or outside, its intended operational domain.
Reticulum itself is a general purpose communications stack. It will handle any sort of digital communication for you, from sending a single data packet to sending messages or streaming a video call, to serving a library of all human knowledge. But it will not do so itself. Someone will have to write the applications that utilise Reticulum to do those tasks. This also means that Reticulum, in itself, will not allow anyone to have a chat with someone else. You need an application using Reticulum for that, and a Reticulum network.
Right now, only a handful of programs and applications exist that use Reticulum. One of those systems is LXMF, a distributed messaging protocol that enables direct (and offline) messaging between users and machines. There is currently several LXMF clients available that people can use on mobile devices and computers. This is similar to Meshtastic, in that they both serve the same end-goal, of sending messages between users.
I don't know how open or interoperable the Meshtastic protocol is, but I do know that LXMF is very open and easy to integrate in other system, and messages passed with LXMF can be transported over any number of mediums, such as LoRa, WiFi, packet radio or over the Inernet. And you can mix and match the mediums as you please. This is possible since the messaging system is built on top of Reticulum (a general purpose networking stack), and it then gains all the capabilities of it (such as efficient multihop routing, global addressing, strong encryption, good privacy and so on).
I hope this clarifies it a bit. If not please ask away and I will try to answer as best I can!“
