i'd encourage everyone thinking about using it to go read the code (it's fairly approachable) but in short it just connects each node in the cluster to each other node in the cluster via a tcp connection and sends packets between them. there's almost nothing as far as protocol, queue management, congestion control or traffic management. it's discovery mechanism is just shipping lists of peers around. pretty much any competent programmer with networking experience could put together something comparable

it works okay in small clusters on reliable low latency networks but it's not a replacement for an actual network mesh

there have been attempts to fix it but none have really found adoption. i think this is the most notable: https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs