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meshtastic should not be used for protest communications
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Meshcore and Reticulum do that, though they have a much smaller userbase than meshtastic.
So why do people use Meshtastic over Meshcore and Reticulum?
Meshtastic came first, there's a lot of existing Meshtastic networks, and Meshtastic does all of it's processing on the microprocessor (while Reticulum requires a separate computer in addition).
I'll have to look into reticulum. Can you not even have a dumb repeater node without a separate computer?
you can't, because reticulum isn't LoRa focused, the reticulum node is the computer/phone. There's a bunch of other interfaces it can transmit over, like AX.25 (HAM radio, really only useful in EU), serial, Tor, I2P, the internet, and more.
also, since the processing is done on a more powerful chip, it means that it has significantly more efficient routing than Meshtastic. Meshtastic doesn't pick a path, it does flood routing where it has everyone retransmit, while reticulum only transmits as much as it needs to.
(well, you could have a dumb LoRa repeater, but that wouldn't really reticulum, even if it could extend the range of reticulum broadcasts)
yeah I know about meshtastic's sucky routing. but also I think the ability to throw up cheapish simpleish low power nodes is key to its success. Makes it easy to build out a halfway usable little network, stealthily and not a big hit if you lose one to weather or theft or whatever. If every node has to have an rpi and 3x as much solar/batteries it starts to become a lot less feasible to just slap one 20ft up a pole on magnets or whatever.
I don't know about reticulum but I wonder if you could (in theory, I'm sure it doesn't exist yet) have a semi-dumb node that can make basic routing decisions without implementing all the heavy stuff like crypto. because honestly there's plenty of compute available on a lot of these meshtastic devices for something like that, tracking node lists and at least a local route table, but not for running the whole stack
Even just a semi-dumb repeater that could recognize reticulum packets and only repeat them, not any old signal, could be handy, but you'd pretty quickly end up back at flood routing if you wanted multiple of them and couldn't parse the packet. and you'd probably just use up all the airtime that way if you weren't careful.
(we do have ax.25 in the US but its not that widely used and I think running encrypted comms over anything ham would be illegal)
They're working on a C implementation to basically that, but it's not very closed to being finished yet. Reticulum is all Python now, which doesn't work great on microcontrollers. It's like this with a lot of mesh projects, where they have grand plans with awesome features, but stuff goes slowly thanks to a lack of developers.
Yeah, sadly. In America you could buy a license for a business band, those are right near the HAM bands and generally allow encryption, but the convenience drops off a cliff (at least several hundred dollars). Or you could move to a cool country without those restrictions.