Meshtastic is also obscure to the average person and reticulum is a superior protocol (capable of routing across multiple connection types besides just radio, bridging national borders via packet radio or TCP, etc.) and you can connect to to the reticulum network from a normal unmodified cellphone, so regular people are more likely to actually use it than something they need specialized radio hardware to even access. Plus nomadnet exists, so reticulum has actual webpages on it (I'm not as familiar with meshtastic, but I don't think it has webpages).

You're right that reticulum is obscure, but so was meshtastic at some point. It's up to us to change that. I'm already quite impressed by the programs developed for reticulum and more will come as more people get eyes on it. For the last part, I feel I have to mention that reticulum isn't limited to just LoRa nor is it limited to just text chat. It can also travel over packet radio, IP/TCP, and I2P just to name a few. Right now it can do text, voice, and image sharing. But the coolest thing I think reticulum can do is serve markdown based web pages. All encrypted as a rule. I would really encourage everyone interested in this kind of tech to consider reticulum.

Reticulum is transport-agnostic, its main point is running across a dishomogeneous network that might be composed of classic copper/fiber IP links, satellite links, LoRa, laser, whatever