Partyline: A group voice application for Reticulum, built on LXST | Hacker News Reader

Partyline: A group voice application for Reticulum, built on LXST

github.com

50 pointsiamnothere14 comments

Video with demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9dvzzc2cW8

Partylines existed in the UK during the 90s and 00s. They were a way for you to find out where the freeparty scene was happening. You would call up a number with a answerphone message and it would change as the night got later getting you closer and close to where the party actually was.

I had many a fond night, calling up waiting for the message to change.

AFAIK, party lines were when N people were physically hooked up to the same phone line. All N people could talk to each other at the same time without dialing out/having to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

My family had a party line when I was growing up. The other parties who shared the line weren't very happy when 13-year-old me got his first 300 baud modem.

What is LXST? The search results are not very helpful. Edit: “Lightweight Extensible Signal Transport for Reticulum”

Little more context:

Reticulum is a alternative network stack to IP-based networking. It flips quite a bit in terms of topology, enough that most known networking tech has to be re-thought.

LXST is a format and protocol made for real-streaming across Reticiulum networks. It is made by the person who also created Reticulum.

It's very interesting, I've been playing with LoRa radios and planning to take a look at it. It has rather esoteric licensing however. LXST and the sideband chat client are CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 but the main repo looks like a BSD, but with custom clauses:

"""

- The Software shall not be used in any kind of system which includes amongst its functions the ability to purposefully do harm to human beings.

- The Software shall not be used, directly or indirectly, in the creation of an artificial intelligence, machine learning or language model training dataset, including but not limited to any use that contributes to the training or development of such a model or algorithm.

"""

These were added about a year ago by the creator, Mark Qvist, and from what I understand, those terms are highly contentious in the Reticulum community, with some projects creating forks without those terms (which are then disavowed by Qvist).

I'm taking the simple pragmatic step of ignoring them entirely. I doubt either one is legally enforceable. (If I have a Reticulum search engine, am I supposed to try to detect and block search queries for "how do I make a transformer model", because that would be used "indirectly" in the creation of an artificial intelligence? And who decides what constitutes "harm"?)

I suspect something which aims to be as ideologically pure as Reticulum is also going to select for this kind of tilt-at-windmills idealism. I do recommend the Qvist's "Zen of Reticulum", which is a beautiful work of documentation as praxis: https://reticulum.network/manual/zen.html

I imagine it's called Partyline because that's the project this looks based off of:

https://gitlab.com/MarcusHoltz/reticulum-party-line

No, it's not. THere is no relation to this project. Unless I have access to time machine technology or something. Development started back in January but I had to allocate time to other projects. If you check `git log` the first commit was September 4th. Your first commit was September 27th.

You don't use LXST in any capacity, not even using the profiles it provides from Opus/Codec2. (If this isn't just 100% vibecoded jank to begin with)

If you want to say I stole something, I stole the UX from Mumble. I straight up lifted all of the UX from there because it is one of my favorite applications and wanted something Mumble users could switch to without having to relearn anything. I had it open the entire time while developing lol.

This is awesome. Your connecting everything to everything

For a second I read "built on XSLT" and a shiver went down my spine.

My head read instantly Rectum and XSLT. Never heard of Partyline

been playing with for a few weeks, been having a great time with it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com