Huge fan of Reticulum, fixes some of my biggest gripes with Meshtastic. Shame it hasn't got as much adoption yet. For those looking for Meshtastic-equivalent things in the Reticulum ecosystem:

- Sideband: iOS/Android chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband)

- NomadNet: Desktop CLI chat app (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet)

- Rnode: Reference node hardware/firmware (https://unsigned.io/rnode/)

Meshcore is another alternative. I haven't done a deep dive into either but have heard that they both fix some Meshtastic issues.

https://meshcore.co.uk/

Meshtastic: Text message mesh network using LoRa modems.

Reticulum: full network stack (alternative to IP), mesh, focus on low-speed, unreliable connections. Transport layer agnostic. Current 'Hardware drivers' are written for LoRa, Internet Tunnels, Wifi, Amateur radio.

Reticulum sounds great? It is, but still has 2 problems: 1. The only complete & stable implementation is written in Python and 2. The existing end-user applications have confusing and complex UIs (except for the command-line tools for remote shell and file copy).

reticulum cannot scale, it's not topology aware and has no congestion management

First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.

Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.