I've never seen a working Reticulum network in the wild.

Only very very small testbeds.

There are tons of entry points available now [0], and I get thousands of announcements every day.

It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat. I brought up my own transport node and propagation node too to contribute to the mesh.

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fooqux 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd love to get a node working just for fun. But it also seems like a waste since I'm extremely rural. The closest node is 200+ miles away. The chances of seeing any other device but my own connect to it seem slim.

Is there still a reason to do this?

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405nm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

because the protocol is transport agnostic, there are a lot of interfaces to the public reticulum net that you can access over TCP, I2P, or yggdrasil.

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/wiki/Community-Node-L...

takes away some of the fun of imagining the SHTF-all-corporate-infrastructure-is-gone scenario i guess but i think that for realistic mesh networking applications it’s cool to build out many infrastructure types and enjoy the fact that the mesh will reconfigure itself realtime across a variety of scenarios.

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randerson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perhaps there are others in your neighborhood in the same position, who would only get into it if there were other nodes. So be the first, get your friends into it, and maybe more nodes will follow. It's only $30 or so for a device.

They have a decent range (15 miles or more) so depending on how rural you are, you might be able to create a line of repeaters back to a major population center.

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fooqux 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Lol, I'm rural enough that the concept of "neighborhood" has no meaning here. I'd have to have a neighbor first. And friends all live further away than 15 miles.

Your point still stands though.

	▲	brewtide 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I literally just put the meshtastic antenna on the roof today, in an old services box. Been in the window for months, had a few weird perfect weather moments show a few nodes and a ping. Put it on the roof, hours ago, nothing yet. Someone has to start up the area! (I live in nowhere maine).

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bb88 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).

My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.

OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.

	▲	DrewADesign an hour ago \| parent [-]
		For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.