[SuperMouse]

I've never seen a bigger network with Reticulum in the wild. And I'm deep into Mesh stuff with several local communities.

One of the main reasons of the communities not jumping onto the ship was that it's mostly a one-man-project and most of its Git changes are "Update" "Better Version" "Update" "Cleanup" which makes it basically impossible to track changes.

[agent86]

And, as of 3 weeks ago, the one man is "stepping back from all public-facing interaction with this project".[1]

Further, "Occasional updates may appear at unpredictable intervals, but there will be no support, no responses to issues, no discussions, and no community management in this or any other public venue."

Nothing salacious here - just another one man open source project with a burnt out maintainer :(.

[1] - https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1069

[sunshine-o]

The reticulum dev have been trying to quit for years and have been quite open about his own personal struggles.

More recently:

- v1.0.0 was supposed to be the time his involvement is over [0]

- 6 months later [1]

> This is not a temporary break. It's not "see you after some rest", but a recognition that the current model is fundamentally incompatible with my life, my health, and my reality.

- But he pushed 3 releases since his last message [2]

It is like he is trying to quit somking.

I am not sure what the problem is exactly but it seems someone need to take over and honor the fantastic work he has done over the years.

- [0] https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_05_09_The_End_Is_Nigh_For_...

- [1] https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html

- [2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/releases

[jalict]

Just found this post; and I see Liam Cottle _just_ did a talk at FOSDEM26 about the situation and the future:

https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/9NCWUR-reticulum_...

[latchkey]

To be fair, satoshi stepped back too.

[mbrochh]

Yea, because he was dying.

[405nm]

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.

[pelagicAustral]

Unsurprisingly:

> To the small group of people who has actually been here, and understood what this work was and what it cost - you already know where to find me if it actually matters.

>To everyone else: This is where we part ways. No hard feelings. It's just time.

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/MIRROR.md

[Evanito]

> I've never seen a bigger network with Reticulum in the wild.

Bigger than.. what?

> One of the main reasons of the communities not jumping onto the ship was that it's mostly a one-man-pr...

Reticulum does not support group chats. Which is a far more realistic explanation than suggesting the average user cares what the commit messages are.

[agravier]

So what mesh stuff do you recommend for the uninitiated?

[agent86]

In the LoRA/radio device sense, Meshtastic[1] is probably the easiest to get started with. It's the biggest player in the space, has devices that come pre-installed and configured, the most likely chance of making contact with someone else, etc. MeshCore[2] is the other major player. It's newer and tends to have been adopted by communities that have run into issues with large Meshtastic networks.

If you meant PC-based mesh networking, I'll leave someone more knowledgeable to speak about that :).

[1] - https://meshtastic.org/

[2] - https://meshcore.co.uk/

[blep-arsh]

I've had some experience with both Meshtastic and Reticulum, and Meshtastic software was mostly unusable for me even with 3-node networks. E.g. a node sends a message and gets a successful delivery notification from the receiver but the receiver fails to display the message to the user. Reticulum was mostly working fine. Haven't tried MeshCore yet.

[fragmede]

Meshtastic also doesn't really... work. Let me qualify that. You can get a couple of nodes for cheap, and you can (with a bit of work) get messages to go between them. The problem is coordination between nodes is required for the network as a whole to work. Specifically, user adjustable node -local settings can overwhelm the network for everyone else around you. Defcon "solves" this by providing firmware to flash with preconfigured settings tuned for the event. But hopefully this makes the problem obvious - in some other scenario that you might hope to use them - and TBC, my goals for a long range, non-cellular network mesh network are for connectivity during a hurricane/flood/firestorm/earthquake/tornado/etc.

An open implementation is preferred, because it drives down the cost of hardware and lets users purchase the grade of hardware they want. But if it doesn't work, an imperfect proprietary solution(s) available now > hypothetical perfect future solution.

[mytailorisrich]

Lora, especially on regulated bands that are the most used ones, is designed for very small, very infrequent messages. It isn't suited for real-time chat (nevermind secure) and so I think you can't really make it work while respecting transmission regulations.

There are lora modules that work on the 2.4GHz ISM band but then you probably need to consider whether Bluetooth is not a simpler choice if range is not the no. 1 concern.

[BSDobelix]

>It isn't suited for real-time chat (nevermind secure)

It is encrypted on private channels and direct messages.

>and so I think you can't really make it work while respecting transmission regulations.

I don't know from where your information's are from, but for sure not from reality. Voice encryption/scramble on Amateur-Band's is not allowed, everything else is ok.

[MarsIronPI]

My dream would be to have something like Yggdrasil[0] over some kind of mesh-based transport. Yggdrasil already does a good job with routing, it just needs a mesh-based transport IMO.

[0]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

[jkingsman]

Big fan of MeshCore; been using it recently and it Just Works. Especially where I am in the USA Pacific Northwest, the mesh is always hopping with conversation. I have run into delivery issues a single digit number of times over hundreds of messages.

[0x457]

If you're talking radio mesh, then MeshCore and Meshtastic. Meshcore does chat much better than Meshtastic.

Meshtastic is good if you're in a remote location, and you want to connect a bunch of sensors and trackers.