It was before "Americans" came along.
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.
[1]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2021/06/19/preparing-for...
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)
I wish TLS behaved better with private networks but I around certificates continues to mostly be oriented around the Internet.
in pf syntax:
table <yggdrasil> persist file "/etc/yggdrasil-allowed"
pass in quick on tun0 inet6 proto tcp from <yggdrasil> to port $servicesThe 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
> 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?
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.
(Sometimes being first doesn't help.)