Johnathan Corgan
5896021ad2
Forward-merge of the maint cut. Four conflicts, each resolved in a stated direction. Cargo.toml, Cargo.lock and README.md all resolve toward master. master is 0.5.0-dev, which outranks 0.4.2, and the same logic covers the README status badge. The README also matters for a reason the plan does not mention: master's platform table carries FreeBSD and Android columns that maint's does not, because that work landed here and correctly never went to maint. Taking maint's side would have deleted those rows, and none of the plan's post-merge greps looks at the README. CHANGELOG.md is a reconciliation rather than the insertion the plan describes, because both branches already carried a [0.4.2] section: master's was the pre-reorganization copy it inherited from an earlier maint merge, still dated unreleased. The two hold the identical 80 bullets, established by sorting and diffing the bullet sets rather than by reading them, and differ only in grouping. So master takes the released section wholesale and keeps its own [Unreleased]. The reverse check passes on both blocks by set comparison: [Unreleased] holds 40 bullets matching master's pre-merge set exactly, and [0.4.2] holds 80 matching the released set exactly. No bullet is on the wrong side of that line, which is the failure every heading grep is blind to. RELEASE-NOTES.md needed no resolution. The plan expects a conflict there and warns against hand-editing the mirror pair; master never touched the file while maint replaced it, so it auto-merged.
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.