[HN Gopher] Yggdrasil Network
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Yggdrasil Network
Author : Velocifyer
Score : 80 points
Date : 2026-04-02 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yggdrasil-network.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (yggdrasil-network.github.io)
| woleium wrote:
| it's been "new" fir as long as i have known about it, over 5
| years or so? or is this a different thing?
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| 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
| akho wrote:
| 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.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| 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
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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?
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| cestith wrote:
| 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.
| mbirth wrote:
| Or the yggdrasil daemon from Red Hat:
|
| https://github.com/RedHatInsights/yggdrasil
| postsantum wrote:
| 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)
| xeonmc wrote:
| ootl: what's the deal with hereditary purists and
| authoritarians appropriating nordic symbolism as dogwhistles?
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| postsantum wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine what elf-rights were thinking of
| humans. Perhaps they even had a slur or two
| krapp wrote:
| Definitely for the dark elves.
| Arubis wrote:
| 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.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Thank you for the link, that was a great essay and now I
| need to reread the Discworld novels.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Ah, the nerds, always itching to build the Torment Nexus
| from the classic novel _Don 't Build the Torment Nexus_.
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| 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.
| xhevahir wrote:
| All of Western history comes from the Nordic countries?
| News to me.
| krapp wrote:
| >It's not like us mythology is a thing.
|
| It was before "Americans" came along.
| cluckindan wrote:
| I thought the name is a Max Payne reference.
| mitchbob wrote:
| Earlier discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155780
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158609
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| realreality wrote:
| It's been working well for me as a kind of poor-man's tailscale,
| connecting several VPS and several laptops.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| realreality wrote:
| Yes. All you have to do is whitelist your clients' yggdrasil
| addresses in your firewall.
|
| in pf syntax: table <yggdrasil> persist file
| "/etc/yggdrasil-allowed" pass in quick on tun0 inet6
| proto tcp from <yggdrasil> to port $services
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Have you had issues with bad actors flooding you? And how are
| your routes (when you're stationary?) Just curious
| infogulch wrote:
| 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
| lokar wrote:
| 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?
| mrsssnake wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| 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)
| ajvs wrote:
| Was evaluating this recently, the lack of NAT busting was a
| dealbreaker.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You can make outbound connections to peers to avoid NAT.
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(page generated 2026-04-02 23:01 UTC)