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fips/docs
Johnathan Corgan bb58eb99fd Merge branch 'master' into next
Carries the platform work up: four commits, one per dependency group,
reorganized from ten before they landed on master. The path-MTU
never-loosen rule scoped to the link that measured it; the two control
socket commands that reported success without doing what they were asked;
the UDP listen socket descriptor handed to an embedder and labelled with
the transport instance it belongs to; and instance-qualified peer
addresses, with the validator that refuses a name no configured transport
answers to.

No conflicts, and no adaptation. `git diff --numstat` for what this merge
changes on next matches the master side file for file and count for
count, so the merge took master's diff verbatim rather than resolving
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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.