Just a little project trying replace the internet...

FIPS is a self-organizing mesh network that can operate natively over a variety of physical and logical media, such as local area networks, Bluetooth, serial links, or the existing internet as an overlay. The long-term goal is infrastructure that can function alongside or ultimately replace dependence on the Internet itself.

Systems running FIPS establish peer connections, authenticate each other, and route traffic for each other without any central authority or global topology knowledge, and allow end-to-end encrypted sessions between any two nodes regardless of how many hops separate them.

Nodes in the mesh route traffic for each other using Nostr identities (npubs) as network addresses. Applications can access the mesh through a native FIPS datagram service, or through an IPv6 adaptation layer that presents each node as an IPv6 endpoint for compatibility with existing IP-based applications.

Network architecture is really cool. I wish I had a better grasp of it. This project sounds like a pretty radicle departure from traditional internet architecture. My first question is how is something like this even possible?

The internet depends on centralized infrastructure — ISPs, backbone providers, DNS, certificate authorities. FIPS works over any transport that can carry packets: a serial connection, onion-routed connections through Tor, local area networking, radio links between remote sites, or the existing internet as an overlay. When the internet is unavailable, unreliable, or untrusted, the mesh still works

Nodes discover each other and build routing automatically. Connect to one peer and you can reach the entire mesh. The network self-heals around failures and adapts to changing topology.

This seems pretty neat. Definitely adding it to my list of things to spend more time on.