Services

What good is a network without services? MichMesh runs two ways to talk with more than one person at a time:

	Group Chat	Relay Chat (RRC)
Feels like	A group text	IRC or Discord rooms
Client	Any LXMF messenger: Sideband, MeshChat, NomadNet, Reticulum Mobile App	An RRC client: NomadNet, Reticulum Mobile App
Rooms	One chat per service	Many rooms on one hub
Missed messages	Recent messages replayed when you join or rejoin	Room history replayed when you join; @mentions sent to your LXMF inbox while you're away

Both run over whatever connects you to the mesh: LoRa, TCP, or both. See Connect to the Reticulum Network to get a client online first.

Group Chat

MichMesh's group chat runs reticulum-group-chat (fwdsvc). It's an ordinary LXMF address that behaves like a chat room: anything a member sends to it is forwarded to every other member, tagged with the sender's nickname. There's nothing special to install. If you can send an LXMF message, you can use it.

Join the MichMesh Group Chat

1. In your LXMF client, start a conversation with the MichMesh group chat: 6e54f24ffb316ce6f5e5217e98664fa7
2. Send /join. You'll get a confirmation, followed by the most recent messages so you can catch up on the conversation.
3. Send /nick <name> to pick the name others see. Until you do, it uses your announced display name.
4. Say hi. Everything you send from now on goes to the whole group.

A first message sent without /join gets a reply explaining how to join; it isn't forwarded to anyone.

Useful Commands

Command	What it does
/? or /help	Lists the commands available to you
/info	What this group is, and how to get in
/users	Who's in the group
/nick <name>	Change your nickname (letters, digits, _ and -, up to 24)
/pins	The group's pinned messages
/pause / /resume	Stop and restart receiving messages without leaving
/textonly / /showall	Skip attachments, for slow or metered links, and turn them back on
/leave	Leave the group; /join again any time

Members who haven't been heard from in a few weeks are removed automatically. Just /join again.

Relay Chat (RRC)

Reticulum Relay Chat is IRC-style chat rooms over Reticulum. You connect to a hub, then join as many rooms as you like. MichMesh's hub runs reticulum-relay-chat, which adds two things a standard RRC hub doesn't do:

• History and playback. The hub keeps a transcript of each room and replays recent messages when you join, so a room opens as a conversation already in progress, not a blank screen. Dropped off the mesh for a while? Reconnect and you're caught up. /history asks for more.
• Mentions while you're away. If someone writes @yourname while you're disconnected, the hub sends it to your regular LXMF inbox (Sideband, MeshChat, etc.) as a direct message. It comes from an address named <hub name>(noreply), which only sends; reply in the room instead.

RRC Clients

• NomadNet has a built-in RRC client, and opens rrc:// room links directly.
• Reticulum Mobile App (Android and iOS) has a Rooms tab. RRC is experimental and off by default: turn it on in Settings, then add the hub by its hash or tap it in the Nodes list, where RRC hubs are labelled.

Join the MichMesh Hub

1. In your RRC client, add the MichMesh hub: 1303a636cf76ffffcf359761f0867e37
2. Connect. You'll land in #lobby, with its recent history.
3. Send /list to see the other rooms, and /join <room> to enter one. You can also open a room link like rrc://1303a636cf76ffffcf359761f0867e37/lobby.

Nicknames are first come, first served, and stay yours between visits. If someone already has the name you ask for, you'll get name1 and a notice saying so.

Getting mentions in your inbox

Offline mentions go to the LXMF inbox of the same identity you used to connect to the hub. If your RRC client and your messaging app use different identities, mentions won't arrive. Send /notify address in the hub and compare the address it shows with your messaging app's own. /notify test sends a test notification.

Useful Commands

Command	What it does
/help	Lists the commands you can run, or explains one
/list	Rooms on this hub
/who [room]	Who's in a room
/history	More of the room's history
/link [room]	A link to a room you can paste anywhere
/mentions	Mentions the hub is holding for you
/seen <nick>	When someone was last around
/away / /back	Have mentions sent to your inbox even while you're connected, then turn that off
/notify	How the hub would reach you, and anything stopping it
/whoami	Who the hub thinks you are

Run Your Own

Both services are single static binaries with no runtime to install. They run on anything from a Raspberry Pi Zero to a Linux server, and releases include Windows builds. Each project's README walks through setup; the short version is below.

Whichever you run, back up its identity file. The identity is the service's address: lose it and everyone has to find you at a new hash.

Group Chat

1. Download fwdsvc for your platform from the latest release.
2. Start from the example config: set display_name, and point [[interfaces]] at a Reticulum node such as rns.michmesh.net:7822 or your own rnsd.
3. Run it once. The log prints the delivery destination, the address you share with your group.
4. Message it from your LXMF client, copy your hash from its log into admins, and restart.

The README covers running it under systemd, invite-only groups, propagation-node delivery for offline members, and the full list of moderator commands.

RRC Hub

1. Download rrc-hub and rrc-hub.example.toml from the same release; config keys change between versions.
2. Set the hub name, turn on history_enabled if you want playback (it's off by default, because it stores conversations on disk), and add a tcp_client interface pointing at a Reticulum node.
3. Run ./rrc-hub -config rrc-hub.toml. The log prints the hash people add in their RRC client.

The README has a systemd unit and the operating notes. In particular, keep the ping_interval / ping_timeout keepalive on: it's how the hub knows someone has left, and mention notifications depend on it.

Weather Bot

A bot that fetches the weather for your area, as well as grabbing live satellite images for your area.

1. mkdir -p ~/src/ ; git clone https://github.com/DayleDrinkwater/LXMF-WX-Bot.git ~/src/LXMF-WX-Bot
2. Edit wxbot.py, comment out/copy to a new line the bot = definition and add your own name. for example:

#bot = LXMFBot("Weather Bot - Send 'Help' for more info",announce=36000)
bot = LXMFBot("My Weather Bot - Send 'Help' for more info",announce=3600)

3. Create /etc/systemd/system/wxbot.service to more easily manage starting/stopping/auto-start the wxbot.

[Unit]
Description=LXMF WXbot
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
User=YOURUSERNAME
ExecStart=/home/YOURUSERNAME/reticulum/bin/python3 /home/YOURUSERNAME/src/LXMF-WX-Bot/wxbot.py

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

4. Start the service to make sure it's working. sudo systemctl start wxbot.service

• If there is an error in the service file, you will need to let systemd know when you've updated the .service file. You do this by running sudo systemctl daemon-reload

5. If the service is running, you can enable automatic startup by running sudo systemctl enable wxbot