Today I fumbled thru the install of Rayfish and Yggdrasil. Both are awesome, but Rayfish was so much easier to install and use.
Have you tried these yet?
Here’s the Yggdrasil link:
https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
Yggdrasil has Android, Windows, Linux, Apple installers.
Rayfish only works on desktop right now, but hopefully soon they will be able to get it on Android.
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So…this is kind of like Tor, but different?
No, this is not tor. This is networking. Imagine two computers where you can plug one to the other with an Ethernet cable that’s it. Except that you connect one at your house and I connect the other at my house. They think they are in the same network so I could browse through your files or use a local website you serve. The benefit being that I could be you and I just traveled to your country yesterday. So I plug in my computer and I can see all my files back home from your country. Neither country can spy into my system or see what I’m doing. All they can do is decide that it’s not worth having a national connection if I’m on the network. So they can unplug the entire Internet just to block me watching YouTube from Tampa while I’m in Italy.
Interesting. Never heard of it. I’ll have to do some reading.
Been using Yggdrasil for quite a while at this point, both for encrypted service communication and also as unbreakable VPN links to various places where I don’t want to have to mess about with NAT traversal.
It’s been nice to be able to just drop it onto my router, add an ALFIS DNS entry, and have all my devices just work with Yggdrasil with no additional configuration.
I’m thinking about doing BGP+Wireguard
But rayfish is vibe coded. I’d not trust it.
Evidence?
Well aside from the obvious giveaways in the presentation format of the README.md, and .gitignore, the very first question of its FAQ is:
“You use LLMs? 🤯”
Yes. Heavily. Claude and GLM-5.2 wrote a lot of this repo.
Oooh. I can’t believe I missed that. Thanks!
It also says -
“So it’s all vibe-coded slop.”
The idea is over 4 years old: a trustless, decentralized network with no central entity that can censor who you connect with. I sketched it for years. What an LLM changed was the speed: the prototype came together in a day. The trigger was the release of iroh v1.
Make of that what you will.
Well, at least they tell you to not trust it for production in it’s current stage I guess.
Hmm 🤔
I suppose they don’t work without having
- a coordination server of sorts
- having all the nodes on static IP
Like, if the IPs keep changing, and a device goes offline and then online, how does yggdrasil know how to reach that system?
My phone gets a new IP when I hop from wifi to cell but it’s still able to communicate. Supposedly rayfish has this solved too although I cannot test that since the computer is on my network but maybe I could tether something to my cellphone and test that way.
If you’re using ipv6 supposedly you don’t need to forward ports. So that means that regardless of what IP your ISP gives you, your network should survive.
Never heard of it. Why should I use it instead of established systems?
Because, specially rayfish, both are encrypted peer to peer and have their own DNS and are decentralized. So no company in the middle collecting everything you do in a data center and giving it to your enemies while charging you for it.
With Rayfish you don’t even need a dynamic DNS or FQN so my FQN cost and it’s never ending complications go away. The only problem is that they don’t have an android app yet for Rayfish. For now I’m using Yggdrasil.
So no advantage over something known like Netbird and Wireguard, then
Both Rayfish and Yggdrasil are serverless and can traverse a NAT. So you can’t block them unless you unplug.
