rns.recipes

Some emcomm groups have picked up reticulum within the USA, afaik

Wanderingmagus wrote:

is all of this actually being used by the people who would likely most need the privacy or resilient aspects, like activist groups or emergency response coordination teams, yet?

I'm recently involved in discussions that are comparing the merits for emergency response situations of existing MeshCore LoRa networks versus potential RNS/LXMF LoRa networks. Very preliminary versions of those discussions are just starting to happen now though because it is only in recent months that microReticulum has becomes usable for deployment of LoRa networks.

For activist networks, at least in the North American context, Signal is very widely used and heavily relied upon. There is a pretty widespread awareness of the risks posed by its centralization and dependence on corporate infrastructure. The main proposal I have seen to mitigate that risk is to plan to use Delta Chat as a fallback to Signal if it goes down: https://signal-contingency-plan.info/

I don't think Reticulum currently offers the functionality (groups chat, in particular) or accessibility, to be a viable alternative to Delta Chat in this context. The work by jrl290 on RFed and RetiChat is trying to move in the right direction, though these projects are very new and not ready to be considered as a practical option.

However Delta Chat as a fallback for Signal doesn't help in situations of either more comprehensive internet shutdown, or localized infrastructural failure and power outage. These are some of the emergency scenarios (either political or ecological) where I see Reticulum being most relevant, especially over LoRa, but also over HF radio, as well as TCP via battery-powered satellite internet connections. And most importantly, through combined network that can bridge between all of these fallback communications options and offer much more resilient and accessible emergency comms than all of them operating separately.