Reticulum is an elegant engineers approach to networking. It’s a complete replacement of the network stack, it’s entirely encrypted, and can communicate and can correctly organize global-scale mesh-networks over any connection >5b/s without the need for distributed hash tables, or any resource usage besides bandwidth. This makes it far lighter than GNUnet, and friendly to low-power, low bandwidth, embedded networks and devices.
This makes it viable as a global network, as it is super cheap to interact with. And it can run on any device, including your smartphone natively.
Bandwidth is a physical resource of the natural world. Reticulum is based on the principle of creating systems that (as far as is possible for a computer program) understand the physical limits of real-world resources, and manages them responsibly and intelligently, with well-thought out algorithms.
When that is ultimately not possible any more, human beings have to step in and expand capacity or make other thoughtful decisions on how to manage the available resources. I believe this is the most efficient, holistic and human-friendly approach to creating technologies that actually help us and better our lives.
Is this still an overlay network, or an actual replacement?
Sounds like an own network! Really cool!
Network replacement. The reason this comes from left field for us meshnet tech peeps is because while we have been looking at gnunet and thinking about things from the network side, the radio heads have been building their own mesh nets for ages, and this is the current cutting edge. Same social space behind LoRA.
While we were building from the top-down (ie. trying to start with the singular project), these people started from the bottom up, and got a lot farther. Growing out of radio networking protocols.
This gives them a very fresh perspective, which is why their solution is so elegant and simple. None of that fancy math bullshit that requires heavy calculations.