To quote a famous hacking group: we are legion, we are anonymous.
PhantomNET is a network of users and services that are anonymous in nature. A darkweb of sorts. That word tends to conjure images that have nothing to do with what a darkweb actually is, so it's worth spending a moment on what it means here.
A darkweb is not a place where criminals go to hide. The dark isn't about good or bad — it's about the unseen. A company intranet is not public and not accessible to everyone. By that same definition, it is a darkweb. You can't look into it without permission.
Most people have heard of Tor when they think of a darkweb. A place where criminals do their dealings, sell drugs or weapons. It's where you can find all the illegal things. Right?
Well — all of that is true. Tor is an anonymisation service. It makes sites and users fairly anonymous. And of course, criminals use that to their advantage. But Tor wasn't built for them.
Tor was first constructed by the US Navy, as a communications layer that could be deployed where you don't trust the nodes on the network. The sender is hidden from the transmission nodes, and the transmission nodes are hidden from the recipient. A node can't see what's inside a packet, and it doesn't know whether the next hop is the actual recipient or another relay. Several different pathways can be used to move the same data. Nobody really knows exactly where anything is at any given moment.
It's worth noting that Tor is not a 100% anonymising guarantee. If a party controls enough nodes — especially exit nodes — timing attacks and traffic metrics can sometimes work out who is talking to whom. That's a real limitation and it's part of why this network also reaches into Reticulum.
Reticulum is a decentralised private network. It's meant to use low-bandwidth links like LoRa or packet radio, but it can form links over many different kinds of transport.
Reticulum works in a similar spirit to Tor — cryptographic addresses, a mesh structure — but the goal is different. Tor is built as an anonymised internet, running on top of the regular internet. Reticulum is built as its own internet, capable of running beside the regular internet but not requiring it. It can operate entirely on radio links between two machines, with no internet in the picture at all.
Reticulum itself is only the network layer — the equivalent of ethernet or IP. By itself it doesn't do much. What it enables is what matters.
NomadNet is the world wide web of Reticulum. It serves pages, sends messages, and is the software most people will use to interact with the network. It's text-only — no flashy graphics, no images. Text, ASCII art, and emoji. The old school of the future.
It does support dynamic pages, so the sky is the limit. Several of the services on this network are NomadNet pages served by Python scripts reading from a database. You can read the Daily Packet, browse the library's index, or check the news without ever leaving NomadNet.
For more, see the official Reticulum and NomadNet sites in Links.
PhantomNET is currently connected to the Reticulum official testnet. That may change in the future, but at the moment there are more advantages to being connected than not — you get access to a broad set of nodes and services without having to run your own infrastructure first.
The network is run by a small number of people, mostly volunteers, occasionally out-of-pocket. There is no company behind it. No support desk, no SLA, no guarantee anything will be here next month. Just a set of servers, a shared aesthetic, and a preference for quieter networks.
If you want to help, see Support. If you just want to look around, start with the services or connect.