Bitsocial and Reticulum
Reticulum is a cryptography-based networking stack for building networks over whatever carriers are available: LoRa radios, packet radio, serial links, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, TCP, UDP or I2P. It comes up next to Bitsocial because both remove the company in the middle. They do it at different layers, so they are complements rather than competitors.
Different layers
Reticulum replaces the network layer. It gives applications encrypted, routable endpoints without IP addresses, DNS, certificate authorities or accounts, and it is designed to keep working on links as slow as 5 bits per second with a 500-byte MTU. It does not define posts, communities or moderation; applications built on top add those.
Bitsocial is a social protocol. It runs on the IPFS/libp2p stack over ordinary internet connections, including from a browser tab, and defines communities, publications and per-community anti-spam challenges. See Peer-to-Peer Protocol and Browser Peer-to-Peer.
In Bitsocial's stack, Reticulum would sit roughly where libp2p sits, not where the Bitsocial protocol sits.
How Reticulum works
- Identities. A Reticulum identity is a 512-bit keyset: an X25519 key for encryption and an Ed25519 key for signatures.
- Destinations. Applications create destinations, addressed by a SHA-256 hash truncated to 16 bytes. Packets carry no source address.
- Announces. A destination becomes reachable by sending an announce. Transport nodes forward it and remember the next hop back, so no node needs a map of the whole network.
- Encryption. Traffic is encrypted by default, with ephemeral keys and forward secrecy.
- LXMF. The LXMF messaging layer adds signed messages, direct delivery, and store-and-forward through propagation nodes for recipients who are offline.
Applications built this way include Sideband for messaging and Nomad Network for messaging and hosted pages. The Reticulum manual keeps a list of programs.
Comparison
| Question | Reticulum | Bitsocial |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Networking stack | Peer-to-peer social protocol and apps |
| Designed for | Any carrier, down to slow radio links | Internet connections, including browser tabs |
| Identity | X25519 and Ed25519 keyset | Ed25519 keypairs for users and communities |
| Addresses | Hash of an identity and application name | Hash of a community's public key |
| Finding a peer | Announces spread by transport nodes | HTTP routers return provider peers |
| Social features | Added by applications such as Nomad Network | Communities, posts, replies and moderation in the protocol |
| Spam control | Announce rate limits per interface; LXMF proof-of-work stamps a recipient or node can require | Each community's challenge before a post is accepted |
| Offline delivery | LXMF propagation nodes store and forward messages | Peers keep serving a community's latest state; publishing needs its node online |
Could Bitsocial run over Reticulum?
Not today. Bitsocial has no Reticulum transport, and its data model assumes internet bandwidth: a client fetches community metadata and post content from peers and exchanges pubsub messages, which fits poorly on links built around 500-byte packets and throughput measured in bits or kilobits per second.
The realistic path is narrower: a client that works over a local mesh while disconnected, then syncs with the wider Bitsocial network when a peer or gateway with internet access is reachable. That would be a new client and bridge rather than a change to the protocol, and it is not on the current roadmap.
For builders
Reticulum is published under the Reticulum License: MIT-style terms plus two restrictions. The software may not be used in systems designed to harm people, or in creating AI or machine-learning training datasets. Read it before bundling Reticulum code into a Bitsocial app.
The reference implementation is written in Python. The Reticulum maintainers warn that several unofficial ports of Reticulum and LXMF are machine-generated and carry license claims they consider void, so prefer the reference implementation or programs listed in the manual.