rns.recipes

For me, I saw it for the first time on the letsdecentralise web page a few years ago. I glanced quickly over it but didn't really understand it. I don't even think it had reached the 1.0 yet.

A bit over a year ago, looking at MayVaneDay's blog over I2P, I landed on her article "The web never died" where, among other things she praises reticulum.

I actually looked at it, read the manual, and started taking things slow.
It also allowed me to learn about LoRas, Ham Radio, and getting interested in general at radio stuff.

What about you?

For me I stopped using screens for two years after a severe burn out from having both my work and leisure focused on computer since my early childhood.

One week I had some downtime due to a wound, and I decided to open an LLM of all things, and ask it 'what is the most interesting, innovative project no matter how niche or complex it could be'. The first was ultra precise tracking with GPS, the second was RNS.

Once I saw nomadnet, I was hooked. Gives me vibes of the good old days of the early Internet.

Thought it was ironic given what I now know about LLMs lol

Before that, I was using I2P and Yggdrasil, and occasionally experimenting with other things—I was looking for decentralized solutions... I don’t recall exactly how—maybe I searched for it, or perhaps AI suggested it; I’m not sure. But I eventually came across the Reticulum page. I remember thinking, "This is great—it supports all sorts of different things!" However, I didn't actually use it until much later; at first, I assumed it was just a rudimentary, experimental network.

Many years ago, I designed a temperature and humidity data logger for my two greenhouses. Because the distance between my house and the greenhouses was about 100 meters, wifi wouldn't have worked. So I used telemetry over 2 meter APRS. The hardware I used was based on the MicroModem from unsigned.io. And it was on this website I first learned about Reticulum, which was still in an early stage of development. And honestly, I didn't understand it at all :)

Then, about two years ago, I was asked to help develop a new digital emergency network for DARES, the Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service. They wanted to try Reticulum over LoRa using a high power rnode based on an EBYTE E22-400M33S SX1268 transceiver. This 2 Watt/33 dBm LoRa radio was not supported by the firmware and my task was to alter the rnode firmware to make it work with this LoRa module.
In order to test the rnode I had to learn to use Reticulum. And after a steep learning curve, I became very enthusiastic about Reticulum.

whitepaperkat was the guy whos videos about reticulum i saw, and LiberatedEmbeddedSystems

I was doing some digging into distributed systems like IPFS, terribly disillusioned when I stumbled upon RNS. The approach to network convergence and consolidating the network stack into a design which is encrypted by design hooked me immediately. Still trying to get a handle on everything and explore how to utilize the tech most effectively.

Since the current US government consists of pathetic, malicious, mentally disordered schoolyard rowdies, I have been searching for alternatives to anything controlled by US companies, including Signal.

So I searched and stumbled upon Reticulum. The Zen text impressed me, although I encountered problems when starting.

Only when the Signal people told me they would finally delete my account if I would not synchronize soon with my fucking Smartphone, I somewhat began to understand (and feel) what "your lxmf adress is yours" actually means. What the entire concept means - beyond sounding reasonable.

I stumbled across Mark's amateur radio modem work ages ago (tncattach was useful to me) and just kept following it.

I think the first time i've heard about it was when i was learning about Meshcore, after playing with Meshtastic for a while. I've briefly heard the name and that it's kind of complicated and it's not actually LoRa focused so it went over my head.

When i first encountered it fully and had it explained was actually a video from DataSlayer. I just saw that thumbnail with "Internet killer" over and over again and at some point i just gave it a shot, what on earth is this internet killer thing that i keep bumping into? Then it hit me, i understood what it is and i entusiastically jumped into the rabbit hole.

Nomad1n0 wrote:

[...]

you probably already know this, but dataslayer is a dickhead and a grifter. that said i'm glad something good came out of his video, welcome to RNS

I started playing with Meshtastic and Meshcore and quickly realised that although a bit of fun initially neither had any real-world use and their architecture just doesn't scale over more than a few tens of nodes. I quickly tired of "can anyone hear me?" and "wow, 10 hops".

I watched a few idiotic Reticulum "prepper" videos on Youtube but then came across Simon Phillips' videos on setting up various parts of a Reticulum network. That got me started and we are building a local network here now using LoRa where possible but internet and VPN where no RF path is possible.