Johnathan Corgan
025ab49d26
Uses the 'ours' merge strategy to keep all of master's tree verbatim with one carve-out: the v0.2.1 release notes archive at docs/releases/release-notes-v0.2.1.md is retained as a permanent docs artifact. Discarded from maint's release-prep commit: Cargo.toml / Cargo.lock version bumps (master stays on v0.3.0-dev), README v0.2.1 badge and prose, and the RELEASE-NOTES.md root mirror (master's root mirror will eventually carry the v0.3.0 release notes when v0.3.0 ships from this line). CHANGELOG: the v0.2.1 release section is integrated between [Unreleased] (v0.3.0-dev work) and the [0.2.0] historical section. Items that landed on maint during the v0.2.1 cycle are removed from [Unreleased] so [0.2.1] is the canonical home for those changes (Linux release artifact and AUR workflows; bloom fill-ratio validation; seven maint-line bug fixes).
FIPS Documentation
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports — local networks, the public internet, Tor, Bluetooth, or point-to-point links — without central infrastructure.
With FIPS, your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity. There are two ways to deploy it.
As an overlay on top of existing IP networks, FIPS lets your node reach any other FIPS node wherever it sits — behind a NAT, on a different ISP, on a phone over cellular, on a laptop with only Bluetooth in range, or behind a Tor onion. The mesh forwards IPv6 traffic transparently and end-to-end encrypted, with no central VPN concentrator or coordinating server.
From the ground up over raw Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth, FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS. Any node that joins the link gets routable IPv6 addresses, peer discovery, and a path to every other node automatically.
Either way, existing networking software runs over it unchanged: SSH, HTTP servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native works the same way it would on a local network.
New to FIPS? Start with the Getting Started guide.
Documentation Sections
Tutorials
If you are starting from scratch and want a guided path to a working mesh, go here.
How-To Guides
If you have a specific task in mind — enabling a feature, deploying a component, diagnosing a problem — go here.
Reference
If you need to look up wire formats, configuration keys, command flags, or counter inventories, go here.
Design
If you want to understand how the mesh self-organizes, why FIPS makes the choices it does, or how the pieces fit together, go here.