Many questions: comparison of chat features with alternatives, threat model, metadatas, audits

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

Hi,

(I opened this in discussion here but it might be considered a feature request for more docs)

I heard about reticulum for the first time today and must say I'm hyped. I am left with a few questions that I think would deserve being addressed (or if already addressed, appear more prominently in the docs). I couldn't find a FAQ, maybe it wouod be useful to centralize some answers there.

1. Has reticulum been audited?
2. What thread models do you seem appropriate? What about when it's out of beta?
3. How does the chat compare to alternatives like signal, wire, threema, ricochet, briar, lora mesh based nets etc. In terms of feature like video calls? Photo? Files? Sealed sender? What about threat models? Latency? Max attachment size? Metadata leak? Forward secrecy key change frequency?
4. You mention it is decentralized but that does not mean that someone scrutinizing the network cannot learn anything about peers: what metadata can be known? What do peers know about each other? Are measures in place to avoid timing and packet size based network analysis? What if the attacker owns 90% of peers?
5. Is the network resiliant to DDOS like attacks?
6. Are there rate limiting features in place to avoid flooding?
7. reticulum is optimized for low bandwidth but does that make it high latency even if I have high bandwidth&low latency internet access? What is the typical latency for packets?
8. If there are peer hops involved, how many? Why not less or more? Can it be configured? Does the latency vary wildly or is it pretty constant?
9. Given that it is a networking solution, are there project to make tunneling or a VPN on it? I can imagine the benefit of reaching my other computers using reticulum instead of wireguard. This could also be used to encapsulate other messaging apps with it like xmpp. And adding "output nodes" that can reach internet would make it somewhat like tor no?
10. On the subject of VPN: what must be known for two peers to exchange packets with each other? Edgevpn for example encodes its whole config as a single base64 token so that with this token (+ a few things you can hard code like port number/service name, that sort of thing) two peers can talk. I'm still unclear on what is needed in reticulum. In short what is the equivalent of asking a signal user's phone number.
11. Is there a mechanism to know if the recipient received a packet? Are there automatic retries if the message/packet seems to have gotten lost?
12. Is there a newsletter / rss feed to follow this project? Ideally rss.

Thanks a lot. Really hyped about this! It was mentionned by someone on hn and I think you deserve more exposure.

Ps: just if unclear: i know some of my questions are already addressed somewhere. I just think useful to know what I think should be more prominently mentionned. A FAQ seems like a good idea to me.