Yggdrasil Network

I was pretty excited about it 3-4 years ago, but it seems like it's kind of an abandoned project at this point. Anyone making use of it and have any impressions?

There have been a few updates recently including a revival of the iOS app which had languished for some time.

I use it as a VPN to connect my phone to my home network which are both peered privately to a VPS.

It's a bit convoluted vs directly connecting to home, but it was easier to set up than worrying about dynamic IPs, port forwarding, and exchanging Wireguard keys.

Multicast peering is neat in that I can access my home server directly using the same Ygg IP when I'm home. Problem is, I have to use an IP; the iOS app doesn't support configuring a custom DNS server for the Ygg VPN connection.

Headscale is really a better solution for this use-case, but it's kind-of neat to know there's an alternative Internet available with just an additional peering.

Definitely not abandoned, but it’s a free-time project for myself and another developer. At the end of last year we released version 0.5 with a new protocol design, and roughly a month ago released 0.5.9 with link cost changes to dramatically improve network latency.

Thanks for that update, you might want to post a quick blog update because that was where I was looking to see what the activity was. I get it about free-time projects, I have some of those myself. Thanks for your work on this, it is definitely very neat!

One or two others have also asked for a project update on the blog so I’ll be sure to draft something up soon! :-) Thanks for your interest!

Using Yggdrasil as a mesh VPN for your devices could be a great use case.

From a quick search it seems you do not even need a static IP address [0]

I am not familiar with Yggdrasil and can't wrap my hear around how this is possible !

- [0] https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/472679

Why would you not look at the code repo for checking activity? There are so many active projects without regular blog posts.

Yggdrasil just works, so there is less of a need for developers to be in the chatroom discussing how to fix the problems with it.

I use yggdrasil right now on all of my devices so I can ssh between them even if they are behind NAT.

Using termux on android and the yggdrasil android app I can access files located on my home computer while I'm on the go without storing them in a cloud somewhere.

Agreed. If the Yggdrasil Android and iOS apps supported zero-touch MDM configuration like Tailscale, I'd try it out but my guess is the performance still wouldn't match WireGuard.

Update: 83% comparitive speed using a US QUIC peer, not bad actually...

I use it all the time to connect to my boxes at home when I'm out and about, and I chat with friends on an IRC server running on there.

Development is pretty active, and the latest release just improved the routing algorithm by having it favour hops with the lowest latency which had a noticeable improvement.

If you're looking for a big community hub within the network you might be disappointed (you could always try to set one up!), but there are a lot of people using it for their own purposes and the protect is far from abandoned.

To join the larger public Yggdrasil network, you need to peer with at least one publicly reachable node. Most likely that machine has a static IPv4 address. There are a number of such nodes operated by volunteers, and they enable the magic that allows any device to join the network and immediately start receiving inbound traffic from the rest of the network. By opening an outbound connection to the public node, a channel is created for traffic to flow back to the non public node.

This is what I do at home. That way I don't have to fiddle with my router. This paid off in a way I didn't expect; when I got TMobile home internet I found out the router has almost no configuration, but all my devices could still be reached via their IPv6 addresses on my private Yggdrasil network.

A reasonable question... In English we read left to right and the "Blog" link was left of the "Github" link. :-) And I just didn't think about it once I saw the most recent blog post was from a year ago about an "upcoming 0.5 release" and no update on the release. I'll admit, I did a half-assed job.