Out of the box your computer only talks to Reticulum devices on your local network. Going online adds links to the wider community network over I2P, an anonymous network that runs on top of the internet. Other people on Reticulum can then reach you, but they cannot see your internet address, and you cannot see theirs.

You can switch back to offline at any time. Your identity, your messages and your other settings stay as they are.

Read Privacy first if you want to know what going online shows to others.

Go online

  1. Open a terminal.

  2. Type this and press Enter:

    permanet-rns --online

  3. The installer shows a plan. If your computer does not have the I2P router (i2pd) yet, the plan says it will install it and shows the exact command. Type y and press Enter to go ahead.

  4. When it asks for your password, type the password you use to log in to this computer and press Enter. The letters do not appear while you type. That is normal.

  5. At the end you should see:

    Online: I2P links take 2 to 10 minutes to come up.

On Fedora, i2pd is not in the normal software list, so the installer first adds the repository that the i2pd project points to. It checks that repository’s signing key before it adds it, and only lets it supply i2pd.

Check that it works

Wait about 10 minutes. The very first start can take longer, because i2pd first has to find its way into the I2P network. Then type:

rnstatus

Look for lines starting with I2PInterfacePeer. Under each one you should see Status : Up. Once they are up, MeshChatX can open nodes outside your local network.

If they still say Down after 20 minutes, see Troubleshooting.

Go back offline

Type this in a terminal:

permanet-rns --offline

This removes the I2P links and stops i2pd. Nothing else changes. The i2pd program stays installed, so going online again later is quicker.

Do not add other internet connections in MeshChatX

MeshChatX has an Interfaces page with Add Interface, a list of suggested public servers and interfaces it discovers on the network. Do not add or switch on any of them. Most connect over the plain internet (“TCP”), and a TCP server sees your real internet address and can link it to everything you do on Reticulum. The installer turned the suggestions off once; leave them off.

Your connections live in Reticulum, not in MeshChatX: permanet-rns --online and --offline are the way to change them. MeshChatX’s Restart RNS button isn’t needed either; if MeshChatX acts up, close it with meshchat --stop and open it again.