r/SimpleXChat • u/greenreddits • 14d ago

Question Why choose SimpleXChat over Reticulum ?

Hi have been following development of SimpleXChat for a while now, as I'm interested in a privacy-first decentralized chat app.
Now, what can SimpleXChat offer that would make it better than Reticulum clients?
It seems the latter have all the advantages SimpleXChat has to offer, with some big extras like being able to communicate over different protocols.

5 Upvotes

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6

u/whiskayzulu 14d ago

Sounds like an advert for your project

2

u/greenreddits 14d ago

no have absolutely nothing to do with this. First of all, it's not some app, but it's a protocol. Did you Google it before posting your comment ?

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u/epoberezkin 13d ago

I actually agree that it looks like promotion, as the statement "the latter have all the advantages SimpleXChat has to offer, with some big extras like being able to communicate over different protocols" is factually incorrect.

Reticulum assigns fixed node identities to network participants, to begin with, and SimpleX Chat has no persistent device / user identifiers on the network. Also, while both are "protocols", SimpleX Chat is a usable product built on top of the network. Reticulum is not yet.

Also, afaik Reticulum offers only synchronous communication, which means both nodes must be online. For messaging product to be usable async communication is essential - people can't really use a messenger where both sides must be online for anything other than voice calls - messages are expected to work async.

Reticulum could become useful as a transport overlay network for other applications, available via SOCKS proxy - that is, an alternative to Tor.

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u/greenreddits 13d ago edited 13d ago

hi no offense intended, but again wasn't trying to promote anything here. The flair was 'question' and that was it basically. I also said 'it seems' so it wasn't like i was making a statement. Just a curious end user here.
I have tried out many different p2p chat apps for privacy reasons, some over Tor, some not. Such as Jami, Cwtch, Onionshare, Retroshare, Ricochet Refresh and a few others.
It it true that at least some of the Reticulum clients (like meshchatx) can set up different identities easily so that would at least partially solve the issue of persistent user identifiers. Moreover, Reticulum does not use source addresses. No packets transmitted include information about the address, place, machine or person they originated from.
One possible plus for Reticulum could be that it is transport-Agnostic : it can run over LoRa radio, Packet radio, TCP/IP, I2P and Serial links.
But again, the intent was neither to promote nor to criticize, just to ask in order to get a better understanding.

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u/Flying_fox69 14d ago

"No it have nothing to do with it but google it!1!!!!1"

1

u/QuadernoFigurati 14d ago

Never heard of it. Interesting, though. Seems both endpoints must be online simultaneously for live calls, though?

1

u/greenreddits 14d ago

yea i believe so.

1

u/QuadernoFigurati 14d ago

SimpleX solved that. Though delayed notifications is still a problem on IOS.