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News |
Communities |
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Communities around the world are experimenting with the Reticulum ecosystem and deploying autonomous networks, and we are here to help you start your own! The Internet was exciting in the 1990s, but turned out to be dissappointment by now, ruled by giant corporations, authoritarian governments and crypto bros’ startups. It is time that people claim back connectivity and rebuild planetary computation from below, with resilience, sustainability and solidarity in mind. Reticulum is a cryptography-based mesh networking stack with a focus on privacy and versatility. It evolved into the swiss army knife of mesh networking, able to interoperate between many different carrier media (Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRa, HaLow, serial connection, packet radio and paper prints, etc.). It is designed for usability over low-bandwidth and high-latency connections, but is equally capable of operating at broadband speeds. Thus, Reticulum is a tool for building many networks. Resilient networks without kill-switches, surveillance or censorship. Networks that can freely connect, associate and disassociate with each other. Current capabilities include text chat, voice calls, multimedia messages, location sharing, telemetry streaming, but also interactive websites, bulletin boards, multiplayer gaming, drone control and Git hosting for software projects. Virtually any concievable application can leverage the Reticulum API. Services and client software run entirely in userland and support any operating system. Existing hardware options include user-friendly smartphone apps, or super secure Blackberry-like pagers for end users, as well as standalone relay nodes comprised of low-power microcontrollers that can extent network coverage. Legacy WiFi access points or smart devices, small and big computers can also be used to build out infrastructure. Reticulum can run on anything and the kitchen sink, while the system forms a self-healing mesh at scale and sends data over the most efficient path. Reticulum is built with radical political ideals of technological solidarity baked into the protocol designs. Participating in the network, providing services and extending connectivity requires no permission from anybody, such as user accounts, registration or licences. Users and services auto-generate their address derived from a private key. The protocol design is in the public domain, the references implementation is under a permissive MIT licence with anti-military and anti-AI clauses, and all other notable software in the ecosystem are free and open source. Core Reticulum software is increasingly distributed over the Reticulum network itself, making the network self-hosting and proving its maturity. Technical details and practical guides can be found in the documentation section. Why we made this website?Reticulum is developed by Mark Qvist, with contributions from other FOSS projects and the Reticulum user community. We have observed a gap in user-friendly and accessible information regarding the Reticulum Network Stack (RNS) and a lack of clear pathways for communities who would like to dedicate within the Reticulum ecosystem. In response, we are committed to filling this void by offering a wealth of resources and insights to enrich your journey into the world of secure mesh networking. Political intentionsWe are against all landlords, digital and otherwise. We do not accept slightly more distributed forms of centralization and hierarchy. We aspire to rebuild our world to be uncentralizable - to make hierarchy structurally impossible. We insist on the freedom of everyone to move and live anywhere, while also being free to communicate with anyone anywhere else. We are against all need for coordinators and bureaucrats - no clouds, no masters. We seek to build trust in an untrustworthy world through secure peer-to-peer connections rather than through institutional mediation. We believe in forms of freedom that come not from growth and consumption but through understanding the physical and ecological realities of our world and sharing respectfully within them. We want to want to be free to disconnect, and to be resilient in the face of involuntary disconnection. We want to be free to decide what is truly important let go of the rest. We reject the lie that the world is too complex and too expensive for us to directly meet our own needs. We believe that we can and must organize ourselves, on a planetary scale, without corporations or bureaucracies. We believe in the voluntary, distributed, self-coordinated efforts of billions of individuals. We believe in taking responsibility for rebuilding this world, and not waiting for anyone to come and do it for us. We're not dropping out of this world, we're building the tools we need for the new world burning in in our hearts and just waiting to spread. |
New website
This is the new website for the Reticulum community. The idea is to provide a fresher and friendlier portal to people seeking information about the protocol than the usual entry point at https://reticulum.network/. That includes tracking changes happening there and putting them in the context of the wider Reticulum ecosystem. Summer Global Reticulum Meetup The plan is to bring together people organising around Reticulum, working on software, hardware and infrastructure in their local context and/or on the world scale. If there is enough traction then the Friday of https://tbd.camp/ (July 2-3-4, 2026 in Amsterdam) may be fully dedicated to mesh networking, with enough time in the weekend to test gear on the big terrain (Het Groene Veld) of this self-organised hacker meeting. Feel free to ping “Maxigas” on the Reticulum Matrix or Signal chats to coordinate.
Reticulum pagers work now! You can run Reticulum on microcontrollers now, even though things are still rough around the edges. Several projects build on the microReticulum firmware by attermann. Ratspeak, rDeck and Pyxis are turning LilyGo T-Decks and similar hardware into Reticulum pagers. Think of them like Blackberry over Reticulum. Test stand-alone microreticulum node! RTNode targets the popular Heltec WiFi LoRa V4 boards to make them function as stand-alone autonomus “transport” nodes, which relay messages to extend connectivity in their local area or connect LoRa nodes to other ones further down the Internet. This is a big thing for Reticulum fans because you do not need a full-fledged (Python-capable) computer to use your favourite protocol any more! Yes, you can power LoRa base stations with solar power now and leave them on trees up the mountain… You can use Reticulum over Bluetooth! The Android app called Columba – released last year – have been an instant hit with people who seek user-friendly interfaces to the Reticulum network. However, its developer Torlando did something even more ingenious recently: implemented a Bluetooth interface for Reticulum. Thanks to the Bluetooth interface, you can now operate mesh networks with as much as a bunch of Android phones. No external LoRA radio or predeployed WiFi access point necessary! |
Webring
Client software Micron sites Inside the Reticulum network.
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