Nomad Network

Nomad Network is a Reticulum-native application: pages, file distribution and messaging that live entirely inside Reticulum. There is no DNS, no certificates, no IP addresses and no hosting provider. A node announces itself, other people browse it, and that is the whole system.

It is easiest to think of it as a small self-hosted web that happens not to touch the internet. Pages are written in a lightweight markup called micron, served straight from a directory on your machine, and reachable by anyone who can route to your Reticulum address — over the internet, over I2P, or over a LoRa link with no internet involved at all.

What ScotMesh hosts

Node	Address
ScotMesh Reticulum Node	10a839df2c50635bcb0c8a299b9ca0f8
Entry page	10a839df2c50635bcb0c8a299b9ca0f8:/page/index.mu

It carries the same connection details as our web pages: how to reach the backbone over TCP and I2P, and how to join the chat room. The node announces itself hourly, so once you are connected it should simply appear in your node list without you needing the address above.

We also run an LXMF propagation node (c283b754e0acc11ce48d2f5e29167e0c), which is what makes offline messaging work: it holds messages for people who are not currently connected and delivers them when they reappear. Most clients find it automatically.

Browsing Nomad Network

Out of the box: MeshChatX has a Nomad Network browser built in. Open it, pick the ScotMesh node from the list of announced nodes (or paste the address above), and the pages open like a website.

Full installation: install the Nomad Network client itself and run it:

pip install nomadnet
nomadnet

It opens a terminal interface. The Network tab lists nodes that have announced themselves; select one to browse its pages. If you know an address you can enter it directly. Announces take a few minutes to arrive after you first connect, so an empty list on first run is normal rather than a fault.

Hosting your own node

Any machine that runs Reticulum can host pages — a Raspberry Pi, a spare laptop, or the same box as your transport node. It costs almost nothing to run.

1. Enable the node

In ~/.nomadnetwork/config, under [node]:

[node]
  enable_node = yes
  node_name = Your Node Name
  announce_at_start = yes
  announce_interval = 60

announce_interval is in minutes. The default is 360 — six hours — which in practice means nobody ever hears you, because clients that connect between announces have no way to learn you exist. An hour is a much more sensible figure for a node you want found.

2. Write your pages

Pages live in ~/.nomadnetwork/storage/pages/. The entry point is index.mu. Micron markup is compact:

`c`F2c8`!My Node`!`f
`cA one line description
`a
-

>About

Plain paragraphs need no markup at all.

>>A smaller heading

  Indented text is used for code and config blocks.

`[A link to another page`abc123...:/page/other.mu]

Markup	Effect
> >> >>>	Headings, three levels
`! … `!	Bold
`* `_	Italic, underline
`F2c8 … `f	Foreground colour (3 hex digits), then reset
`c `a	Centre, then back to normal alignment
-	Horizontal divider on its own line
`[Label`hash:/page/file.mu]	Link to a page on a node

3. Dynamic pages

A .mu file with the executable bit set is run rather than served, and whatever it prints becomes the page. That is all there is to it — a shell script or Python file that prints micron gives you a live page. Nomad Network ships a message-board example that works exactly this way.

4. Restart and check

nomadnet --daemon --console

Give it a few minutes, then look for your node in someone else’s Network tab. If it does not appear, the announce interval is the usual culprit.

Why bother

A Nomad Network node keeps working when other things do not. It needs no domain, no certificate, no static address and no port forwarding; it is reachable over radio with no internet at all; and nothing about it depends on a service that can withdraw it. For a mesh community that is the point — the documentation about the network should be reachable from the network.

Pages on standalone radio nodes

Nomad Network pages do not have to come from a computer. Nodes running the ScotMesh firmware serve their own page straight from the radio board: a home page with battery and uptime, lists of routes and neighbours, and admin pages for the node's owners. Every page fits in a single LoRa packet, so it loads first time over a weak radio link. Browse to such a node exactly as you would any other; ScotMesh microReticulum describes what each page does.