Reticulum network stack

What hackers pick instead

• YggdrasilRecommended as a stable, self-organising IPv6 mesh that runs quietly in the background and works as a Tailscale alternative. Critics note it is not built for anonymity or censorship resistance.24recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 137 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Reticulum uses AES-256 encryption, which is considered quantum safe due to the sheer number of extra combinations

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore”

2. Reticulum is not a general purpose protocol-agnostic data transfer network into which you can plug anything.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Reticulum, a secure and anonymous mesh networking stack”

3. The full protocol spec is there, I built mine from this without even touching the reference implementation.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network”

4. Can route over just about any medium (piggyback IP, Lora, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, microwave P2P, anything).

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27”

5. because the protocol is transport agnostic, there are a lot of interfaces to the public reticulum net

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code”

6. A bigger problem with Reticulum is that it does not appear to offer robust protection against abuse.

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network”

7. It's really cool, but as far as I know there's no complete C++ implementation for embedded platforms

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”

8. The protocol is fairly simple, encrypted by default, and works over lots of interesting transports.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)”

9. it's better than the usual situation with new RFCs etc, where no implementation actually exists

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Mesh over Bluetooth LE, TCP, or Reticulum”

10. Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “The Zen of Reticulum”

11. over radio the bandwidth is so limited that what you can realistically send are just messages

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances”

12. a proper overlay network that provides encryption and cryptographic IDs instead of domains

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Pact: Anonymous Credentials for the Web”

13. Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Think of the Children: How to Force Real ID for All Internet Traffic (2023)”

14. it is a very well-thought out approach to distributed networking at the protocol layer

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code”

15. I personally support initiatives like Reticulum/NomadNet, I2P, the Gemini protocol

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27”

16. being agnostic to communication channel sets it apart from the lora only meshes

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Mesh over Bluetooth LE, TCP, or Reticulum”

17. enforces decentralization and abuse/advertisement/... inherently doesn't scale

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?”

18. I'm very excited about a future that abandons the web and builds on reticulum

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Pact: Anonymous Credentials for the Web”

19. the reticulum protocol in general as a peer-to-peer alternative to www

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?”

20. 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.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “The Zen of Reticulum”

21. mainly just different protocol parameters allowing Reticulum to work on really slow links, but also wastes performance on really fast links

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse”

22. It doesn't seems like «Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing over heterogeneous carriers» advertised by this project, rather opposite.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Reticulum, a secure and anonymous mesh networking stack”

23. a few observer nodes will be able to see which repeaters the message first entered the network from

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network”

24. Reticulum is not worth getting into, the utilities and general infrastructure just isn’t there yet.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Mesh over Bluetooth LE, TCP, or Reticulum”

25. Reticulum feels like an eternal "one day will be great" project but we keep waiting and waiting.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Meshtastic”

26. It implements 20% of Reticulum functionality. And it has 2 major protocol incompatibilities

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Reticulum, a secure and anonymous mesh networking stack”

27. being able to bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard requirement

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The Zen of Reticulum”

28. seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)”

29. This is idea for text messages and occasional telemetry. But 'full-on SSH session'? ... That sounds like a really bad fit.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Reticulum Is Interesting”

30. a LoRa based Reticulum network is enshittification resistant, because of physical bandwidth and range limitations

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?”

31. Reticulum (for multi medium) and Tor onion sites (for private hosting over legacy IP) and you're already there.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax”

32. I haven't done a deep dive into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic issues.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Meshtastic”

33. It's so much fun with little pages, message boards and random people hitting you up for a chat.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code”

34. On Internet: reticulum is great. I'm seeing about 700 connected devices across different hubs.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network”

35. not widely deployed and really requires network-connected LoRa nodes to be worthwhile

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network”

36. They're just not good, because they're meandering prose written by Mark for himself.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore”

37. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The Zen of Reticulum”

38. Reticulum has more to offer, it's just not the welcome mat/filter the others are.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “An Introduction to Meshtastic”

39. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout”

40. it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe”