reticulum is a bit bumpy
I have just a handful of troubles left in using Reticulum, for the most part it’s been a smooth setup. The remaining problems have to do with:
- announcements
- Micron bullets
- git-remote-rns
Trouble with Announcements
I have thatit.be running a gateway with LXMD, RNS, and NomadNet. I don’t know how many of these pieces are necessary, as my goal was to serve pages and have a backbone that I could use for connecting to IP traffic. I didn’t want it falling over dead whenever I accidentally closed NomadNet while debugging, so I’m running them individually. Technically I could get away with running NomadNet by itself and it would launch all of the pieces, but I can’t get it to announce properly. I know announcements are a thing that happen, and I see there is LXMF traffic, but none of the nodes I have connected are consistently seeing announcements from thatit.be. I’ve had to manually add it to node lists in order to browse it. This is weird because coppertop.lan – a system on my lan that acts as a local connection to thatit.be has no trouble announcing and showing up places like rworld.map. Despite nearly identical settings!
Additionally, there seems to be some unknown amount of time necessary for routes to propagate when nodes first start up. I have some that seem to never seem to get routes and others that get one immediately.
Update: This problem seems to only happen on ONE of my systems. The others have good routes upon connecting.
Trouble with Micron
NomadNet pages (Micron syntax) claims to support bullets, but I’ve put what I thought were valid bullets in a page and the result is a bunch of lines with no text. This can be viewed here (when viewed from reticulum) or on any pages where I have bullets. I haven’t seen it work correctly anywhere. So far I’ve tried MeshChatX, MeshChat, and NomadNet to view my stuff and other people’s stuff, and in all cases I’ve just seen weird lines show up with no text in all instances of bullets I’ve tried to render.
Update: Bullets don’t seem to be anything special. A unicode character bullet in a line and everything renders as it should. But hyphens at the beginning of a line cause a horizontal rule and eliminate text. It’s weird, but managable now that I’m using the RNS internal method to make markdown into micron.
Another Micron issue is escape sequences aren’t supported. I suppose it’s not really an issue with Micron, but I have pages where I used ANSI escape sequences to color text. This isn’t well supported in the land of Gemini, with inconsistent rendering, but it’s been a way to add colors to otherwise pre formatted text. Gemini doesn’t support tables, so I used pre formatted blocks with GitLab-flavored markdown tables inside them. Obviously they don’t render as tables, but the Markdown is basically human readable. Then I put ANSI escapes around stuff I wanted to color. It made for decent highlighting, but this doesn’t port to Micron. I experimented with converting the escape sequences to Micron color formatting, but Micron pre formatted blocks wont render Micron colors. So, for now, I strip out ANSI color codes when I generate Micron.
markdown into micron
Trouble with RN Git
I’ve tried to use a python virtual environment to get rngit, but I get a weird error about bad hashes whenever I try to use it to clone something. This is too bad because I’m looking forward to being able to do all the things over reticulum. And it looks like the RN Git server piece is able to handle page hosting, so I wont have to run NomadNet, too. That’s pretty awesome. Or will be, once I figure out how to get it to work.
I’ve fetched the latest NomadNet source, so now I need to either figure out how to package that up for Nix or wait for the Nix to get a newer version. Unfortunately I’m having issues using any kind of pre-packaged dependencies because there are some API differences that I don’t know how to resolve yet. The solution might just be to fetch all of the things and make packages for everything to work around, but that’ll take a while.
Update: Turns out there are other Nixers making use of Reticulum and some of them have made overlays. So now I’m using the latest Nomadnet which comes with the latest rngit and it all works like it’s supposed to. I just git clone an rns destination and it works.
Tags: index, reticulum
overlays
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created: 2026-05-08
(re)generated: 2026-05-22
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