Last night I lit up my connection to Hyperboria which has been neat. Other than connecting, I haven’t done very much, but setting up cjdns was exceptionally straightforward. The hardest part of it was finding other users to peer with.

It seems to be a lot like what I imagine the early internet was like. There are a few peers and no real central authority. Names are assigned organically, and most seem to be on the network for experimentation. There are peers providing classic services like IRC and project mirrors as well as more modern services like a URL shortener and a reddit clone (Uppit).

Having a network atop the internet is an interesting concept, though definitely not new. I like the peer-to-peer aspect of it, and the trust-based peering ideals behind Hyperboria seem like a good idea. You’re only supposed to peer with others you consider trustworthy, to avoid having a single central authority. There are some central services, like HypeDNS, that are unavoidably central for now.

Bandwidth is, of course, less than the best, but I’ve been able to pull as much as 60 K/s, averaging more like 50 K/s. It’s fine for things like hosting a git server, or loading the node info page, but it isn’t cut out for media operations.

Meshnet projects like Hyperboria have a lot of potential, and I look forward to seeing a lot more of them in the future. It’s going to become especially important if anonymity becomes a concern to more people and they look to projects like cjdns and Tor.