alt Hacker News> but none of them have clear protocol specification docs
This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of protocols beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does ELRS. Maybe I'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off by the friction: I must integrate your software, in the language you used, and will likely hit compatibility problems as a result.
Exactly. And are you going to break it one day just because and force every node to run the new version of firmware to stay active. I like implementers who show some transparency and some self-reflection about the limits of the protocol. And to be clear, in looking through the other docs in the Reticulum repo, it looks like there are more protocol details there, so maybe Reticulum has that transparency.