rns.recipes

TL;DR: Just go to retichat.com

So I felt the need to AI-write a web implementation of Reticulum, called Reticulum-post. For four reasons:

• to harness the power of Reticulum in webpage form
• to take advantage of a massive amount of cheap network infrastructure
• to help make Retichat/RFed more accessible and build support for the extension
• because we can

You may or may not imagine, it was a bit of a trick making Reticulum work with the ephemeral nature of POST requests. But if LoRa and QR codes can carry Reticulum, HTTP should be no problem.

Bidirectional initiation is straight forward. Just like LoRa, each node just pushes data when it has something to say.

Web servers don't work like that. They're meant to be stateless. And servers generally can't send data to a network address without the client initiating the connection first. There is major efficiency to be gained from that. Maintaining connections is cumbersome. Splitting up the process into self contained chunks allows servers to handle many requests from many machine without trying to remember the state of each machine (mostly)

Reticulum works really well in that format. It is designed to be asynchronous and sometimes sparse. As the spec says: as low as 5 bits per second. So this implementation takes all of Reticulum's packet building, relaying, path management, and clean up and shoves it into a buffer, waiting for the next initiated "exchange". Clients merely poll for both sending and receiving data, and the 0 data poll is very lightweight

That's the long and the short of it. It doesn't require anything on the server side except php. In order to bridge it to the backbone network, I have my one rnsd node polling (1 per second) with a custom interface, PostInterface. But ideally someone that isn't behind a firewall would do a bidirectional bridge

As usual, this is heavily AI written and completely open source:
https://github.com/jrl290/Reticulum-post
https://github.com/jrl290/Retichat-js

And it is very early in development. It really only started out as a proof of concept and now it is worth seeing to the finish. I think it is good to develop Retichat in parallel so that I can stay consistent as I understand fully what shape it should take

Still primitive, but foundationally much more fleshed out now. The php backend can connect bidirectionally to another php backend or to the PostInterface extension to rnsd. The javascript client still only polls via post requests. But it is still a complete Reticulum node

Also, I have another server to continue developing on, so I'll leave retichat.com in a stable condition for people who want to experiment with it

Hmm, I think I need to add your POST interface to reticulum-js

https://github.com/Quad4-Software/RNS-over-HTTP

There's been RNS over HTTP/S POST requests as an interface for quite a while

A better approach to Reticulum in the browser is using WebAssembly and sockets. While possible, POST requests really aren't the right tool here. I would look into the Go ports WASM build https://reticulum-go.quad4.io/wasm-example and rns-js https://github.com/liamcottle/rns.js/

Zenith wrote:

https://github.com/Quad4-Software/RNS-over-HTTP
There's been RNS over HTTP/S POST requests as an interface for quite a while

That's quite different, though, as it does point-to-point instead of client-server. Very suitable for a "proper" Reticulum daemon (for example Python, Rust, Node.js) that needs to pass its traffic as regular HTTP. But obviously wouldn't work in browser as we can't serve HTTP there.

Still, I'm thinking to implement both in reticulum-js. Here's the POST client:
https://github.com/bergie/reticulum-js/commit/64e837c43d37ac9a135a91a2350da7e7c9407314

A better approach to Reticulum in the browser is using WebAssembly and sockets. While possible, POST requests really aren't the right tool here. I would look into the Go ports WASM build https://reticulum-go.quad4.io/wasm-example and rns-js https://github.com/liamcottle/rns.js/

WASM won't really solve anything, you still can't get out of the browser sandbox.

But yes, rns.js does exist but hasn't been maintained. In the end I decided to start reticulum-js from scratch to build 100% on the standardised web platform (so it'll work now and in the foreseeable future) in both browser and Node.js.

Hmm, I think I need to add your POST interface to reticulum-js

By all means! I had looked into WebSockets but it was pretty much impossible to host them on my shared web hosting service. It makes me wonder why WebSockets aren't a first class interface in rnsd. Seems the people with the server resources to host a backbone node could easily add a Websocket interface. Even with PostInterface, the bridge rnsd on my home network is in polling mode instead of bidirectional mode

https://github.com/Quad4-Software/RNS-over-HTTP
There's been RNS over HTTP/S POST requests as an interface for quite a while

I asked if there was an analogue in this post: https://rns.recipes/forum/general/post-based-interface

I don't suppose you know of another browser LXMF client?

jrl290 wrote:

By all means!

It is now in reticulum-js git, in case you want to verify interoperability. I don't have PHP environment handy to test myself.

There's also a Node.js HttpPostServerInterface in the repo.

It makes me wonder why WebSockets aren't a first class interface in rnsd.

Until now there haven't been that many browser Reticulum participants. Maybe we'll see this take off.

Looks good at first glance

I'd just make sure to add the 'wake' alternative to polling in the Node.js server module. I don't imagine anyone would want more than 1 or 2 polling connections if they can help it

In case anyone has been wondering about the inconsistent behavior of retichat.com, it's because I was installing a true bidirectional POST interface bridge to the backbone network. Now the only polling that occurs will be from the browser itself. Everything is orders of magnitude faster that way.

If people want to write their own browser apps using PostInterface, you can have it point to https://retichat.com/reticulum and it'll be connected to the full network. But of course, I would very much appreciate it if someone else who has a backbone node would add-on the PostInterface python interface here: https://github.com/jrl290/Reticulum-post

jrl290 wrote:

If people want to write their own browser apps using PostInterface, you can have it point to https://retichat.com/reticulum and it'll be connected to the full network.

This might be useful for bootstrapping. The WebRTC interface needs another Reticulum connection first for signaling. Then the rest of the traffic (between WebRTC capable clients) is P2P.

I plan to host couple of public Reticulum WebSocket servers, but it is always good to have options.