[HN Gopher] The Zen of Reticulum
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The Zen of Reticulum
Author : mikece
Score : 87 points
Date : 2026-01-20 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| barishnamazov wrote:
| Also discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273
| citizenfishy wrote:
| Middle out
| jna_sh wrote:
| Good to see recent writings and changes, I had taken from the
| December 2025 blog post that the maintainer was done:
| https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html
| orbifold wrote:
| At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI
| generated content and human content that we will stop using the
| Internet and it will be left to bots.
| rednafi wrote:
| Dead internet theory [1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
| immibis wrote:
| Personally I'm waiting for the "everyone is 12 internet
| theory" to get a Wikipedia page. (Of course I am - I'm 12)
|
| non-wikipedia garbage site reference:
| https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-
| theory-19314...
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically
| freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its
| restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed
| to harm humans" prevents it from being used in e.g. militia
| groups in oppressed countries who may wish to use it to harm
| humans in self-defense.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It's such a strange and unfortunate addition to the project.
| Also, what's the point of assuming every entity is potentially
| hostile? Can't you just put in the license "you're not allowed
| to be malicious or hostile on this network"?
| subscribed wrote:
| Just read the manifest.
|
| GP used intentionally hostile and weird interpretation of "if
| you intend to subdue, enslave or kill, don't use it", aimed
| at dictatorships, organisations like Palantir, etc.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| What? If I'm in a militia group that resists oppressive
| governments, I intend to kill people. Therefore I'm not
| allowed to use Reticulum to coordinate with my mates, even
| though most people would agree that I'm not killing
| immorally.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| That's still a restriction on freedom. Some people's notion
| of malicious might disagree with the author's.
| drob518 wrote:
| I suspect such groups don't really care about abiding by the
| terms of a license agreement. You can sue them... if you can
| find them.
| subscribed wrote:
| I'm sure such militias wouldn't worry about the ToS.
|
| However there's a chance apartheid and authoritarian countries
| would not use it exactly because of this.
| ronsor wrote:
| > However there's a chance apartheid and authoritarian
| countries would not use it exactly because of this.
|
| I don't think they will care.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| Yep. People wanting to do the right thing and prepare at
| scale for self-defense won't violate the license but the
| people it intends to restrict will, because they don't
| care.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| A) In self-defense, you don't intend to harm humans, but are
| only doing so when it's down to your life or theirs. So such a
| system could be argued to not be designed to harm humans, but
| instead preserve your own life.
|
| B) In any case, I'm OK with it. Having the software explicitly
| licensed like this may prevent it from being legally considered
| a terrorism tool or munition if a bad actor were to be found
| connected with it, and if that happens, that's going to have
| much more freedom-restricting consequences with respect to the
| software.
| catoAppreciator wrote:
| >Willing to kill.
|
| >Not willing to violate the license of a software package.
| animuchan wrote:
| Thank you very much! I also feel that the impact of software
| licensing on violent groups behavior might be low.
|
| It is, however, interesting on principle, since it only
| allows the use by criminals (implicitly), and not by law
| enforcement. By then making the tool very impractical to use,
| we can punish bad actors still.
|
| (I think there was a honeypot operation to this effect,
| something with feds making up a "secure encrypted phone" and
| then acquiring Cartels as a major customer.)
|
| (On the off chance I just burned this very similar operation:
| dear feds, I'm so sorry!)
| subscribed wrote:
| Did you really say that only criminals are permitted to use
| Reticulum?
|
| So presumably, by the extension of your argument, average
| person using Reticulum is either ("implicitly") a criminal
| or breaking the licence / ToS.
|
| Where do you see it?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The maintainer is actively saying they're stepping back from
| the project
|
| so explain to me how the license is going to be enforced?
| drob518 wrote:
| I've looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over
| the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical
| document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of
| the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification
| docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are
| absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I
| suspect each of them has major scaling issues. Sure, mesh
| networks are great because they are more resilient, but if you
| trust nobody and you have no sense of a route to a destination,
| you're left with flooding as your primary next-hop selection
| method, which means you're going to be about as scalable as an
| old Microsoft LAN Manager network was in 1995 (which is to say
| not very). Short of reading the code, does any sort of protocol
| documentation (or better yet, analysis) exist for Reticulum?
|
| Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more
| technical details.
| https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...
| AyyEye wrote:
| Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-
| based" lmao. Typical hn comment.
|
| Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the
| first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are
| hidden at the very top of the git repo.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Design goals are great. How do they actually achieve it?
| AyyEye wrote:
| Not with flood routing.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yes, you said. You've been very helpful in telling us how
| it doesn't work.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| flood routing works fine locally, from there on use IP to
| connect the local networks, no need to reinvent the
| wheel.
| drob518 wrote:
| Exactly. Okay, that's a great claim. How? Also, "planetary
| scale" is meaningless. With the right node count (low),
| topology, and radios, just about any mesh network can
| achieve "planetary scale." But that doesn't mean it'll
| support 10 thousand users, never mind millions. There are
| underlying technical reasons that the Internet works the
| way it does.
| drob518 wrote:
| Okay, maybe Reticulum isn't strictly LoRa-based, but others
| are (e.g. Meshtastic), and while Reticulum works over lots of
| physical layers, the README specifically states "An open-
| source LoRa-based interface called RNode has been designed
| specifically for use with Reticulum."
| the__alchemist wrote:
| > but none of them have clear protocol specification docs
|
| This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of
| _protocols_ beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does
| ELRS. Maybe I 'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if
| your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off
| by the friction: _I must integrate your software, in the
| language you used, and will likely hit compatibility problems
| as a result._
| drob518 wrote:
| Exactly. And are you going to break it one day just because
| and force every node to run the new version of firmware to
| stay active. I like implementers who show some transparency
| and some self-reflection about the limits of the protocol.
| And to be clear, in looking through the other docs in the
| Reticulum repo, it looks like there are more protocol details
| there, so maybe Reticulum has that transparency.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Meshtastic is the most popular in my area. I can see about 150
| nodes from my house in a US county of ~300K (though actually
| being able to talk to most of those remains questionable).
|
| I am certain the popularity of Meshtastic is down to how easy
| they have made it to onboard. Buy the module, flash using the
| web flasher, install the app on your phone, done. There's a
| Youtube tutorial on every street corner for this, even though I
| (and seemingly many people) don't find Meshtastic to be all
| that reliable.
|
| For reference, this is what Meshtastic has to say about their
| flood-based mesh protocol:
| https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/
| drob518 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not harshing on Meshtastic's node counts. In
| some sense these systems are like packet ham radio. They
| appeal to a specific user base. I just question how their
| protocols are going to scale, and even 150 nodes is extremely
| small compared to the number of people around you who are
| using the Internet, WiFi, etc.
|
| So, for instance, at the URL you referenced, it says at the
| bottom:
|
| > As meshes grow larger and traffic becomes more contentious,
| the firmware will increase these intervals. This is in
| addition to duty cycle, channel, and air-time utilization
| throttling.
|
| > Starting with version 2.4.0, the firmware will scale back
| Telemetry, Position, and other ancillary port traffic for
| meshes larger than 40 nodes (nodes seen in the past 2 hours)
| using the following algorithm:
|
| > ScaledInterval = Interval * (1.0 + ((NumberOfOnlineNodes -
| 40) * 0.075))
|
| > For example an active mesh of 62 nodes would scale back
| telemetry.device_update_interval to 79.5 minutes instead of
| the 30 minute default.
|
| It looks like they are already building back-off strategies
| as the net scales, and that starts to happen at very low node
| counts (just 40). So, what happens when node counts hit 500
| or 1000? Again, not trying to throw stones; just trying to
| understand how far these protocols can go and how they
| degrade/fail as they scale. Ideally, they don't fall over and
| even possibly get more robust (with more nodes, there are
| typically more topological connections between nodes, which
| provides more possible paths and resiliency).
| reticolon wrote:
| Reticulum has no bandwidth management. If your node or the
| whole local area is flooded with traffic from the rest of the
| network there is nothing you can do.
|
| "Reticulum does not include source addresses on any packets"
| and with that you cannot throttle passing-through traffic based
| on source. Any hope of scaling is gone.
| tbrockman wrote:
| I believe the recommendation would be to use
| https://reticulum.network/manual/using.html#using-
| blackhole-... in such scenarios.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Seattle is showing >400 nodes for meshcore:
| https://meshcore.co.uk/map.html
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| > The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of
| failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut
| down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the
| "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled.
|
| The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what
| has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a
| lot over the past few years. (now I'm working on trying to solve
| some of this - well, at least build alternatives for people).
|
| and this:
|
| > The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If
| you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get
| a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized
| control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system
| optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite.
|
| Seems to be implying (as well as in other places) that this was
| all coordinated or planned in some way, but I've looked into how
| it came to be this way and I grew up with it, and for me, I think
| a lot of it stemmed from good intentions (the ethos that
| information should be free, etc.)
|
| I made a short video recently on how we got to a centralized and
| broken internet, so here's a shameless plug if anyone is
| interested: https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated
|
| Too bad nobody wrote a book called "the mythical man month" to
| dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the
| way the world works
| perching_aix wrote:
| Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate?
|
| I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would
| put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already
| hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its
| totality?]".
|
| One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead
| of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated
| they are compared to others, or fall victim to the
| consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly
| recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness,
| and similarly little substantiation.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Sure
|
| If creative people don't think at a systems level or a
| political intersectional level when doing design then they
| will completely ignore or miss the fact that engineering is
| a subset of a political or otherwise organizational goal
|
| The key problem with most engineers is that they don't
| believe that they live inside a political system
| perching_aix wrote:
| I think that's an important consideration, especially
| with telecommunications technologies, but the author
| seems to have been pretty mindful of that angle from the
| get go, i.e. they seem to have been frustrated with the
| state of affairs from the beginning.
|
| Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another
| case of someone thinking their technology is what's going
| to right the ship that is society's current trajectory,
| then bailed when that didn't come to be? Cause while I
| can certainly see that being the case, I'd say such a
| cycle is as much desperation as it it naivety. I think
| this is even reflected in it being a PHY-agnostic thing,
| meaning as far as an effort into anything goes, it's a
| fairly enduring one.
| muvlon wrote:
| But the part about the undersea cable is simply wrong! Major
| undersea cables have been disrupted several times and never has
| a "continent gone dark".
|
| I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what the
| internet is. It is the most resilient computer network by a
| long shot, far more so than any of these toy meshes. For
| starters, none of them even manage to make _any_
| intercontinental connections except when themselves using the
| internet as their substrate.
|
| Now of course, if you put all your stuff in a single
| organization's "cloud", you don't get to benefit from all that
| resilience. That sort of fragile architecture is rightly
| criticized but this falls flat as a criticism of the internet
| itself.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| People naturally want to maximize the value they extract from
| any system.
|
| If you hand individuals or groups the internet, they will
| naturally use it for spam, advertisement, scams, information
| harvesting, propaganda, etc - because those are what gain them
| the most.
|
| The 'enshittification' if the internet was inevitable the
| moment it came into existence, and is the result of the
| decision of its users just as much as any one central
| authority.
|
| If you let people communicate with each other on a large scale
| at high speeds, that's what you get.
|
| The only way to _avoid_ the problem is to make a system that
| has some combination of the following:
|
| * No one uses
|
| * Is slow
|
| * Is cumbersome to use
|
| * Has significant barriers to entry
|
| * Is feature-poor
|
| In a such a system, there's little incentive to have the same
| bad behaviors.
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| We'd probably agree on this: people respond to incentives
| created by system design. One example that comes to mind is
| how London's Congestion Charge and how it has changed traffic
| behavior over the years depending on how the rules change.
|
| There is nothing inherent about fast, large-scale, or user-
| friendly communication that forces spam, scams, or
| propaganda. Its just that those outcomes emerge when things
| like engagement, attention, or "reach" are rewarded without
| being aligned to quality, truth, or mutual cooperation.
|
| This is a well-studied problem in economics, but also
| behavioral science and psychology: change the incentive and
| feedback structure, and behavior reliably changes.
|
| Based on the studies I've read in and around this topic, I
| think harmful dynamics are not inevitable properties of
| communication, but really contingent on how each system
| rewards actions taken by participants. The solution is not
| slowness or barriers, but better incentive alignment and
| feedback loops.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Philosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your
| manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near
| as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh
| projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there
| doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or
| maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and
| I could probably figure it out, but some user who actually needs
| this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about
| this, but it is a little ironic.
|
| Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use
| PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put
| together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for
| Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a
| hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).
| drob518 wrote:
| Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you
| looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a
| download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you're going to
| need to download the source code and a compiler. I'm not much a
| Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn't seem
| particularly bad. But I'm probably missing your point.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| My goal is to be able to do all steps of the typical
| Meshtastic youtube tutorial without access to the internet.
|
| I like to liken it to my other hobby of retrocomputing. In
| the old days, your whole OS and all the applications ran from
| a few floppies and a couple of books for documentation. If
| you need to duplicate the environment, just make copies of
| your disks. And of course you need an original set to start
| with. But nobody thinks of that as "offline", that's just the
| normal way it works, and yet it seems more offline than
| modern projects who claim to be offline.
| appplication wrote:
| If you're pip installing you can just toss your venv on a
| floppy/cd/flash whatever if you're so inclined. I'm not
| sure I understand the concern. The need for internet is a
| sliding scale with your own resourcefulness.
| anthk wrote:
| Reticulum and Nomadnet should have been ported to Go long
| ago; you can bundle all the dependencies under a zip/tgz
| file just in case, and provide static binaries for
| everyone. NNCP, Yggdrasil... every portable project uses
| sane choices. With Python you need Pip, pinned releases
| and a beefy machine.
| wtallis wrote:
| "The internet no longer exists" is a particularly extreme
| subset of off-grid scenarios. For the more plausible off-grid
| scenarios--the ones that have _actually happened_ --the
| unavailability of the internet has been varying degrees of
| localized and temporary. In that context, being able to
| bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet
| infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard
| requirement.
|
| In particular, it seems obvious to me that any preparedness
| plan that requires a user to acquire in advance specialized
| hardware (eg. a battery/solar-powered long-range radio of some
| kind) to be used with an off-grid network can reasonably expect
| that user to also be prepared with the software to drive that
| hardware.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| The whole project is a convenience. If I were in a situation
| where I actually had to rely on Meshtastic for comms, I'd be
| pretty nervous. It doesn't really work that well. Luckily,
| I've only enjoyed Meshtastic recreationally. Where this comes
| from is from me trying to learn about and set up some nodes
| on vacation in an area with very limited internet. I followed
| the tutorials, thought I had what I needed, but I was wrong.
| Woops, documentation is online. Within the community, I've
| seen "that same thing happened to me" more than once.
|
| As with many hobbies, this is a "just because I can, I will"
| type of thing.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| What you don't think we can put up a shadow internet
| running at 250kbps?
|
| That said, I picked up a couple of prebuilt lora solar
| nodes and a couple of mobile nodes (seed solar jobies and
| seeed mobile jobies) and stuck the solar ones into my upper
| story windows just over new years, one is set up as a
| meshtastic repeater the other as a meshcore repeater.
|
| I'm pretty amazed at the distances I hear from, I'm getting
| stuff this morning over meshcore all the way from vancouver
| bc into my office in seattle (pugetnet.org).
|
| To get it all dialed in having a discord full of old HAM
| guys that know RF pretty well certainly doesn't hurt.
|
| It's certainly hobbiest grade at best. It seems like it
| could be very interesting for installs in small communities
| and larger estates for backhaul for remote iot
| applications. Obviously you aren't going to push video over
| that bandwidth but for weather stations and the like seems
| cool.
|
| Reticulum becomes more interesting when you are talking
| about some of the more robust radio technologies. Building
| a mesh LAN out of old wifi gear is interesting in concept.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Ha! I believe every RNode can be used to bootstrap a Reticulum
| network, as that tiny ESP32 hosts the RNode firmware, the full
| network software stack and documentation! The RNode has the
| capability to become a Wifi access point, if you connect you
| get this at 10.0.0.1.:
|
| https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/
|
| Shit's insanely well thought out! I encourage everyone to dive
| in a bit. It's pure tech porn. (If you can endure the
| occasional Ayn Rand quote lol.)
| snickerer wrote:
| I love that Mark Qvist publishes his strong opinion, view of the
| world, and goals.
|
| It quite smells like the hacker spirit of the 80s, mixed with a
| little spiritualism and anarchism. Very refreshing after so many
| other people are just disillusioned, worn out, angry, or
| frightened.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > The mental maps we carry are dominated by a single, misleading
| image: The Cloud.
|
| > To break free of the center, you must also let go of the
| concept of the "Address".
|
| When I was still dealing primarily with on-prem networks in
| regulated environments (or cloud networks stubbornly architected
| in a fashion similar to on-prem ones) I worked with a _lot_ of
| people that could not and would not ever understand this. It 's
| not just a cloud thing. Some people just cling to using IP
| addresses for everything all the time. They don't understand why
| trying to access the JIRA server via IP wouldn't work because
| they didn't understand SNI let alone a Host Header. Dynamic
| record registration and default suffix settings are nothing more
| than a section of settings to be cruised over during clicked-in
| configuration. Zones can and should be split without regard for
| architecture or usage. Et cetera.
|
| My theory is that because these people didn't understand Layer 7
| stuff like HTTP or DNS they just fall back to what they can look
| at in a console (Cisco ASA, AWS, or otherwise). IPv6 will
| simplify a lot of the NAT stuff but it won't cure these people of
| using network addresses as a crutch. Not really sure what the
| systemic solution is - I was like this once but was fortunate
| enough to be task with migrating a set of BIND servers to the
| cloud and so learned DNS by the seat of my pants. Maybe
| certification exams should emphasize this aspect of networking
| more.
| anthk wrote:
| Not much "Zen" when it barely works under i386 (Atom n270 CPU),
| 1GB of RAM and a simple 80x25 terminal. Sadly, even my usual one
| (100x32/36) isn't good enough to please retrowannabe hipsters.
| ge96 wrote:
| Mentioning HAM-based internet is cool too eg. HamWAN
|
| Oh I guess that falls under packet radio I see
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(page generated 2026-01-20 23:00 UTC)