alt Hacker NewsPhilosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and I could probably figure it out, but some user who actually needs this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about this, but it is a little ironic.
Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).
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Ha! I believe every RNode can be used to bootstrap a Reticulum network, as that tiny ESP32 hosts the RNode firmware, the full network software stack and documentation! The RNode has the capability to become a Wifi access point, if you connect you get this at 10.0.0.1.:
https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/
Shit's insanely well thought out! I encourage everyone to dive in a bit. It's pure tech porn. (If you can endure the occasional Ayn Rand quote lol.)
Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you’re going to need to download the source code and a compiler. I’m not much a Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn’t seem particularly bad. But I’m probably missing your point.
"The internet no longer exists" is a particularly extreme subset of off-grid scenarios. For the more plausible off-grid scenarios—the ones that have actually happened—the unavailability of the internet has been varying degrees of localized and temporary. In that context, being able to bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard requirement.
In particular, it seems obvious to me that any preparedness plan that requires a user to acquire in advance specialized hardware (eg. a battery/solar-powered long-range radio of some kind) to be used with an off-grid network can reasonably expect that user to also be prepared with the software to drive that hardware.