Interfaces are closer than you think!

Ok, so to catch up the audience here a little bit and assuming you dont follow me.
I am a licensed radio amateur, i sometime earlier this year fell into the world of Single Board Computers which lead me down the esp32 and rasph-pi rabbit hole. Eventually i learned of Meshtastic, then meshcore And this other application called reticulum.

I mostly played with meshtastic as around where i live there are basically no nodes.
But after i started building antennas see how far i push line of sight 1 watt radios. For me it was 6 miles mounted to the top of my barn. It was super impressive! but over time with not having a local mesh like a lot of places. I got board and decided to try Meshcore. I installed it and then Unistalled it, because i realized that it was meshtastic but with required repeaters.
So i then dared to install this "reticulum software" And i remember getting less range with reticulum over LoRa compared to meshtastic. But i also had ZERO idea what i was doing and just followed a american YouTuber who was doing what i wanted to do. Not the best idea in hindsight but i do know it was within the ISM unlicensed band so it was most likely fine.

So time jump to today.
I am currently working towards a CompTIA network+ Certification and was reading out of the text book. Lots and lots of very small little things in networking, but we got to a section about cabling. Talking about Coax and signal loss and MHZ, all things that ham radio taught me!
But the more i read this book the less i see a radio, wifi router or a wire as a device and more of a universal interface.

Like the thing that blew my mind was your standard Ethernet Cable are a Transmitter, they alternate frequency and bits on lower levels of the OSI model. Just like a radio, and wifi!

And thats just sooooo freaking cool!
So ive started playing with reticulum again, and it is just such a masterpiece of software that you really can enjoy especially reading about all the OSI layers.

For those unaccustomed reticulum is not just a cool thing you install on a little wireless radio, it is a completely decentralized forward secrecy encrypted network stack. Many people have built software to use the network stack.

For example, each address is randomly generated and is self assigned, it used private keys and public keys to make each block of data is encrypted in transit. You then announce on your interfaces, which are ways of connecting to reticulum. Which can be TCIP, UDP, LoRa, and basically anything that you can send data over.

It such a amazing concept, to put in in perspective. You could be far, far away in the middle of nowhere, no cell towers or wired internet. And you over radio could connect to a far away radio whom has the same settings. And send files, text and access a computer from very far away via ssh!

All over radio, the magic of reticulum is every device that partakes in the network can be a transport node if they so choose. So if i have a raspberry pi and a Lora radio connected to it. Aswell as Ethernet. Somebody can talk via radio to people via the Ethernet and vice versa. Thats the magic part, being able to talk over interfaces and not relying on centralized infrastructure. There is no DNS, every device on the network announces it presents and what path to take to get to it. This allows for users to message over redundant mediums and have full privacy unrelated to how every other node is doing. Half of the reticulum network could explode and as long as you have one interface to still reach your recipent. It will still work, rather if thats over radio, wifi or ethernet!

I would highly suggest checking it out!
there is also nomadnet which gives me mad cyberspace vibes!