in fact, i came across some interesting articles about LoRa communications and Reticulum Network, but i can’t find anything written up that doesn’t assume a certain level competence or background in tech - so i tried to ask in a socialist prepper subreddit, where i was told that i should not be interested unlearning about Reticulum Network because it’s way too advanced and only hardcore techies are capable of using that.

A good background for this specific case would be amateur radio. I actually bumped into the guy developing Reticulum on some IRC channel years ago. It is pretty much just an experimental bespoke mesh networking protocol invented by some guy. I was interested as well, but I did not have the knowhow or the hardware to try it out at the time. On paper it looked like a great improvement from the packet networks in use on the ham bands today.

The best approach to get into this sort of thing would be to study for an amateur radio license test, get on the air and try contacting some stations on established packet networks (APRS being the most common, but there are allegedly still some packet BBSes still running), then learn how to set up a custom encodings on top of this hardware one you’ve proven it.

LoRas are a proprietary system, but it’s capabilities can be well understood from a general understanding of the principles and practical aspects of radio communication.