Reticulum Quickstart Recipe
three different ways to get started with reticulum: Desktop, Terminal, Mobile(android)
- reticulum, whats special?
- Desktop use with ReticulumMeshChatX
- Terminal use with nomadnet
- Mobile use with Columba (Android)
reticulum, whats special?
Imagine being in a Pub with thick walls, so no reception to the outside. then getting a message from a friend you know they are out of range lora-only.
how could that happen? your friend in the pub, also reticulum user had columba on with wifi plus bluetooth as interfaces. so your first hop was using bluetooth to their phone. this next device was able to receive annouces to find paths to others, because wifi connected it also the internet. for example to the friends laptop with the wifi plus lora. so the lora -only human was reachable from there. so chatting is still possible, thats the unstoppable reticulum magic ;)
Desktop use with ReticulumMeshChatX
- go to https://meshchatx.com/ and download and install this all-in-one app
- its all already working if you see "announces" flying in in the announces tab next to messages.
If you want to have a first chat, with someone, you can go to contacts and add and this will open:
you can add a name, its completely up to you... the important one is the lxfm hash (a veeeery long number). thats it, add and try to start chatting.
my lxmf address (on the desktop in meshchatX) is 501abfd8c80690893ccff7df93276bf2
and yes, each device, different contact.
Terminal use with nomadnet
we use nomadnet and install it using pipx like that:
pipx install nomadnet
after starting nomadnet in the terminal
nomadnet
it should look like that:
it works, if you see announces in the announce stream. you can control everything with keyboard and also with a mouse. so network in the menu is clickable and ctrl-L makes the list of freshly received announces visible
to add someone by hand, go to conversations and press ctrl-N to add a new contact, like i did in this screenshot:
in the same step you can "trust" this contact, so it will show up under your trusted contacts later.
Mobile use with Columba (Android)
Just go to https://columba.network/ and install the app to your android phone.