Thank you, Yggdrasil, for being just a compact routing scheme, not a semi-governmental military solution for implementing horrors beyond my comprehesion (they just love nordic or lotr names for that kind of things)
The Nazis were obsessed with a fictional occult quasi-mythology of the "Aryan" race that heavily appropriated Norse mythology and symbolism. The SS symbol was a pair of sun runes for instance.
I think they appropriate Tolkien (who despised the Nazis and their corruption of "Germanic" ideals and Norse mythology) because a lot of them are nerds who don't read too deeply into it, like how right-wingers and conservatives enjoy Star Trek while being completely oblivious to its progressive ideology.
> The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.
> As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.
Is Yggdrasil still using raw truncated ed25519 keys to determine the treespace root node? [1] If so, this seems to be an obvious network availability vulnerability. [2]
Does anyone run private services for themselves on Yggdrasil by allowlisting specific IPs and piggybacking on the routing layer? I've thought about doing this but haven't tried it.
I wish TLS behaved better with private networks but I around certificates continues to mostly be oriented around the Internet.
Yggdrasil was my first distro, but I was evaluating it and another one back to back. I ended up sticking with SLS until I got a RedHat Linux book with a CD in the back - at retail, in brick and mortar book store. The next couple were Caldera and Mandrake, this time in tidy cardboard boxes with multiple discs and multiple books each. I think I got those both at computer/electronics stores. The latency was high, but the bandwidth of driving home with 7 discs was hard to beat at the time.
I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.
The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"
It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying.
There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local
Actually, could anyone compare this to cjdns? On the surface they seem pretty similar. Docs say:
> Yggdrasil was created in order to build a decentralised routing scheme for mesh networks that can potentially operate at a global scale, motivated in particular by significant performance and scaling issues that were present in cjdns at the time.
Tailscale somehow found use for self-hosters, despite being wildly unergonomic for an all-Linux, non-corporate, network. Yggdrasil lacks marketing effort, but is otherwise a great option.
That is a remarkably content-free website. I tried (I think) all of the obvious pages, but still don't know in any detail, how do they handle routing differently from the normal internet.
Can anyone explain? They complain that routing on the internet is (somewhat) hierarchical to scale, but then don't explain their solution to the same problem(s).
The simplified choice has always been distance-vector, or link state. Are they a better attempt at one of these? Some new idea?
You have three devices at home, A, B and C.
Only device A have Internet connection and can connect to public Yggdrasil node. B can connect only to A and C. C can connect only to B.
Have Yggdrasil installed on all of them (and tell Yggdrasil about the peers), all devices would have access to full Yggdrasil network.
And? How is that novel? I read the site as saying the have a new, and better solution to how to do internet scale routing (in an overlay network, but that did not seem like a critical aspect)
Thank you, Yggdrasil, for being just a compact routing scheme, not a semi-governmental military solution for implementing horrors beyond my comprehesion (they just love nordic or lotr names for that kind of things)
I thought the name is a Max Payne reference.
ootl: what's the deal with hereditary purists and authoritarians appropriating nordic symbolism as dogwhistles?
It's where all of western history comes from so it's not very strange to be popular overall. It's not like us mythology is a thing.
All of Western history comes from the Nordic countries? News to me.
>It's not like us mythology is a thing.
It was before "Americans" came along.
The Nazis were obsessed with a fictional occult quasi-mythology of the "Aryan" race that heavily appropriated Norse mythology and symbolism. The SS symbol was a pair of sun runes for instance.
I think they appropriate Tolkien (who despised the Nazis and their corruption of "Germanic" ideals and Norse mythology) because a lot of them are nerds who don't read too deeply into it, like how right-wingers and conservatives enjoy Star Trek while being completely oblivious to its progressive ideology.
Venkat Rao noticed this and turned it into a rather excellent essay: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules
> The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.
> As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.
Thank you for the link, that was a great essay and now I need to reread the Discworld novels.
Ah, the nerds, always itching to build the Torment Nexus from the classic novel Don't Build the Torment Nexus.
It's not hard to imagine what elf-rights were thinking of humans. Perhaps they even had a slur or two
Definitely for the dark elves.
Is Yggdrasil still using raw truncated ed25519 keys to determine the treespace root node? [1] If so, this seems to be an obvious network availability vulnerability. [2]
[1]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2021/06/19/preparing-for...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577201#27580938
Was evaluating this recently, the lack of NAT busting was a dealbreaker.
Does anyone run private services for themselves on Yggdrasil by allowlisting specific IPs and piggybacking on the routing layer? I've thought about doing this but haven't tried it.
I wish TLS behaved better with private networks but I around certificates continues to mostly be oriented around the Internet.
Yes. All you have to do is whitelist your clients' yggdrasil addresses in your firewall.
in pf syntax:
It's been working well for me as a kind of poor-man's tailscale, connecting several VPS and several laptops.
Earlier discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155780
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158609
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
True P2P Email on Top of Yggdrasil Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080143 - Nov 2025 (38 comments)
Yggdrasil Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44337902 - June 2025 (4 comments)
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923380 - May 2025 (3 comments)
Yggdrasil is an experimental compact routing scheme that is fully decentralised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43921624 - May 2025 (53 comments)
Yggdrasil Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155780 - Nov 2024 (106 comments)
Yggdrasil Network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41669625 - Sept 2024 (3 comments)
Yggdrasil P2P mesh E2EE IPv6 network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30156551 - Jan 2022 (77 comments)
Yggdrasil – Early-stage implementation of an end-to-end encrypted IPv6 network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577201 - June 2021 (102 comments)
Show HN: Yggdrasil Network – compact mesh routing experiment for mesh networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18863554 - Jan 2019 (15 comments)
Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751991 - Dec 2018 (3 comments)
Yggdrasil: End-To-end Encrypted IPv6 Networking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18666245 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)
Not to be confused with the Yggdrasil Linux distro.
(Sometimes being first doesn't help.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Yggdrasil was my first distro, but I was evaluating it and another one back to back. I ended up sticking with SLS until I got a RedHat Linux book with a CD in the back - at retail, in brick and mortar book store. The next couple were Caldera and Mandrake, this time in tidy cardboard boxes with multiple discs and multiple books each. I think I got those both at computer/electronics stores. The latency was high, but the bandwidth of driving home with 7 discs was hard to beat at the time.
Or the yggdrasil daemon from Red Hat:
https://github.com/RedHatInsights/yggdrasil
it’s been “new” fir as long as i have known about it, over 5 years or so? or is this a different thing?
Doesn't look that active either. It unfortunately seems like there isn't a great use case for these networks that will adopt usage through the hurdles
I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.
The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"
It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying. There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local
Also see CJDNS, darknet project and hyperboria
Actually, could anyone compare this to cjdns? On the surface they seem pretty similar. Docs say:
> Yggdrasil was created in order to build a decentralised routing scheme for mesh networks that can potentially operate at a global scale, motivated in particular by significant performance and scaling issues that were present in cjdns at the time.
( https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/faq.html )
but that was a while back; where do they stand today?
Tailscale somehow found use for self-hosters, despite being wildly unergonomic for an all-Linux, non-corporate, network. Yggdrasil lacks marketing effort, but is otherwise a great option.
That is a remarkably content-free website. I tried (I think) all of the obvious pages, but still don't know in any detail, how do they handle routing differently from the normal internet.
Can anyone explain? They complain that routing on the internet is (somewhat) hierarchical to scale, but then don't explain their solution to the same problem(s).
The simplified choice has always been distance-vector, or link state. Are they a better attempt at one of these? Some new idea?
Picture this:
You have three devices at home, A, B and C. Only device A have Internet connection and can connect to public Yggdrasil node. B can connect only to A and C. C can connect only to B. Have Yggdrasil installed on all of them (and tell Yggdrasil about the peers), all devices would have access to full Yggdrasil network.
And? How is that novel? I read the site as saying the have a new, and better solution to how to do internet scale routing (in an overlay network, but that did not seem like a critical aspect)