A letter from the person who built this.

If you're considering writing about Lattice, or thinking about installing it, here's where it came from in plain words. No founding-myth gloss.

Glastonbury 2024. Pyramid Stage. 50,000 people in front of me, my partner somewhere on the other side of the field, and my phone showing five bars of signal that did absolutely nothing. Every cell tower in a square mile was at saturation. Messages queued and never sent. The official festival app needed network. WhatsApp needed network. Signal needed network. The thing I needed to do — find Beth — was a problem the entire technology stack of 2024 couldn't solve, despite the fact that her phone and my phone were both Bluetooth-capable computers within wireless range of each other. We met up two hours later, by walking around.

That should have been a solved problem decades ago. The radios are in the phone. The maths is in the phone. The protocols exist. What was missing was someone to pick them up and turn them into a thing my partner would actually install before the next festival.

I wrote a long thread about it that night. The replies converged on the same five answers — Bitchat, Briar, Meshtastic, Reticulum, Bluetooth Mesh — and I tried each one in turn. They are all real, and the people behind them are doing real work. Here is what I found:

• Bitchat works in the room and gives up at the door. No store-and-forward, no group consensus, identity is a public key and that's it.
• Briar is excellent if you and the people you message are technical, willing to leave the app open all day, and understand what an onion address is. It will not survive contact with my partner's phone or her mother's phone.
• Meshtastic is wonderful — but it requires a separate hardware device for every person in the chain, and the protocol leaks more metadata than a privacy-conscious user is willing to accept. It is, beautifully and on purpose, a hobbyist long-range network rather than a private messenger.
• Reticulum is the most architecturally honest of all of them, and the one whose ideas Lattice draws from most. But its mobile clients today are early, and the philosophy is "build your own network" rather than "install one app and it works".
• Bluetooth Mesh is a lighting-control protocol with messaging bolted on. Not what you want.

So the question I sat with for the next eighteen months was: what would the messenger I actually want to recommend to my partner look like? Not a cypherpunk's messenger. Not a survivalist's messenger. A messenger.

Some answers I'm confident about:

• It has to feel like a real messenger. Lock screen icon, ping sound, notifications that work, group chats that update. Not a packet shell.
• It has to be there when you need it. That means it has to cost almost nothing in battery the rest of the time.
• It has to ride every available radio at once. Bluetooth for the room, Wi-Fi Aware for bandwidth, LoRa for the next valley, Meshtastic for the community network already deployed, Tor when there's any internet at all. The user picks none of this — the device picks per message.
• The cryptography has to be hybrid post-quantum from day one, because adversaries can already record traffic now and break it later.
• Identity has to be a 12-word phrase, not a phone number. Because phone numbers are leases the government can revoke.
• The app has to have a coherent answer for "what if they take my phone." Not just one. Eight. Each enabled by the user, each with a different threat model.
• There has to be no server. Not "we don't log." Not "encrypted at rest." No server. The infrastructure I do not run is the infrastructure that cannot be subpoenaed, breached, or shut off.
• It has to be open source. The binary is something I can sign; the protocol is something other people have to be able to verify.

Lattice is what I have so far. It's not finished. I am one person, building this in evenings and weekends, paying for nothing but a domain name and some Apple/Google developer fees out of pocket. There is no funding round. There is no roadmap deck. There is a Matrix room and a build that runs on my partner's phone — and the source comes out under MPL 2.0 when v1.0 ships.

If you have a use for Lattice — a journalist with sources, a protest organiser, a festival-goer, someone who lives somewhere where the internet goes off when the wrong person says the wrong thing — please install it. Tell me what's broken. I will fix what I can. I will not pretend it solves problems it doesn't.

If you want to support the work, buy me a coffee. That is the entire commercial model. There will not be a Pro tier. There will not be ads. There will not be a corporate acquisition. If I can't sustain the work on donations, the project's source comes out under MPL 2.0 anyway, and someone else can carry it.

— S.
2026

Lattice is described in detail at /how-it-works. The protocol papers live in /papers. Press kit at /press.