Johnathan Corgan
60ab868636
A node counted a FilterAnnounce as delivered as soon as the transport accepted it, and announces go out only when a filter changes. A dropped datagram, or a link outage shorter than the dead timeout, therefore left the peer holding the old filter until something else changed, so destinations could stay missing from its discovery indefinitely. Each tick now checks every outstanding announce against the link's existing receiver reports before sending pending announces, and marks the peer again when a report covering the announce shows fewer frames arrived than were sent, or when the announce cannot be confirmed: once, as soon as a usable report arrives, or after 30 s. A report that shows neither delivery nor a loss, as when a reordered frame could be a late one from before the announce, waits for the 30 s fallback. The resend goes out through the ordinary debounced send path in the same tick. Reports from another session are ignored, at most one unchecked and three loss resends are sent per announce per session, and a peer connection sees at most six resends a minute, and one a minute while losses persist. Nothing on the wire changes. The design notes describe the resend and its limits.
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.
Releases
If you want the notes for a particular version — what changed, what broke, and what to do about it on upgrade — go here.