Running your own communications infrastructure has obvious benefits. We live in a world of increasing digital censorship, and are rarely completely in charge of our communications. Even if we choose to use "better" alternatives to WhatsApp, Instagram, etc., we are still always completely reliant on the one underlying network, i.e. "The Internet". With the push of a button, "The Internet" may all of a sudden become unavailable. In places with oppressive regimes, this has not been uncommon. In the current political climate, it would not be surprising if any political system all of a sudden became repressive.
Natural disasters are another very important reason to have ways of communicating with each other. As we saw recently in the floods in Valencia, when disaster strikes, there are no more communication networks for civilians. It is obvious that it is crucial to be able to communicate with your peers when in an emergency: both for moral support; and to increase the safety and chances of survival.
In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities for setting up a decentralized off grid communications system using the Reticulum communication protocol stack. We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities. More information is found here: https://reticulum.network/
The mesh network stack runs on various platforms. You can run it on your desktop, your home server, your mobile phone. In the workshop, we will focus on building some standalone nodes, based on a low power ARM board, that you can connect to your local network, to be able to communicate with your peers.
It can run on top of a wide variety of transport layers. It can run on normal IPv4 networks. However, for us the interesting part is that it also runs on high latency, low bandwidth radio links. These can be Internet of Things networks like LoRa, or packet radio systems using cheap handheld VHF radios. (One such radio is the infamous programmable Baofeng UV-5R.)
We will look at some applications that were build on top of the Reticulum communication protocol stack. There is a simple graphical chat application called Meshchat (https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum-meshchat) that can be run locally on your computer. There is also a BBS style forum implementation, called Nomadnet (https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet). Finally, there are Android mobile phone apps called Sideband (https://github.com/markqvist/Sideband) and Columba (https://github.com/torlando-tech/columba).