Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686273

Middle out

Good to see recent writings and changes, I had taken from the December 2025 blog post that the maintainer was done: https://unsigned.io/articles/2025_12_28_Carrier_Switch.html

At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI generated content and human content that we will stop using the Internet and it will be left to bots.

Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed to harm humans" prevents it from being used in e.g. militia groups in oppressed countries who may wish to use it to harm humans in self-defense.

I’ve looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I suspect each of them has major scaling issues. Sure, mesh networks are great because they are more resilient, but if you trust nobody and you have no sense of a route to a destination, you’re left with flooding as your primary next-hop selection method, which means you’re going to be about as scalable as an old Microsoft LAN Manager network was in 1995 (which is to say not very). Short of reading the code, does any sort of protocol documentation (or better yet, analysis) exist for Reticulum?

Edit: looks like the Reticulum Manual might have some more technical details. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/docs/Reti...

> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled.

The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm working on trying to solve some of this - well, at least build alternatives for people).

and this:

> The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite.

Seems to be implying (as well as in other places) that this was all coordinated or planned in some way, but I've looked into how it came to be this way and I grew up with it, and for me, I think a lot of it stemmed from good intentions (the ethos that information should be free, etc.)

I made a short video recently on how we got to a centralized and broken internet, so here's a shameless plug if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/4fYSTvOPHQs