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Comment by number6 | Hacker News Reader

So it's a kind of VPN?

It's an overlay network (a software defined network that runs on top of another network... like you internet service providers network).

It's closer to bittorent than a VPN. It has end-to-end encryption and each node (the app that runs on your PC) distributes routes to each other (similar to how routing works on the Internet between large networks). It appears to be a flat spanning-tree style network.

They mention that it is using similar code and ideas as the cjdns project.

Do I understand correctly that it does not do hole-punching, and e.g. unlike with a VPN a host behind NAT will not be able to accept incoming connections?

This is correct in the sense of peering, however hosts behind a NAT can simply connect to any other host on the network such as a pubic peer and then they can accept incoming connections over the yggdrasil network.

I use yggdrasil for NAT hole punching my VPN, for example.

can it be a bit compared to what tailscale does for ipv4 ?

I haven't used tailscale so... I think so? Tailscale is pretty light on the details, and even their docs say that they have been reluctant to describe how it works.

>People often ask us for an overview of how Tailscale works. We’ve been putting off answering that, because we kept changing it!

Yggdrasil is fully peer to peer and doesn't require a central coordinator like tailscale does. Ygg is closer to a global network than a private one. You can make a private network, but if any peers on the network peer to the global net then your whole network is now peered. this should be handled at the firewall level, or with an overlay VPN.

This page [1] has answered most of the questions I has on the project.

[1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/about.html

No, it's a kind of virtual public network.

So not a kind of VPN, but a kind of VPN? :)

The "P" in VPN usually stands for "Private", not "Public".

I think that was the joke.

You joke, but unfortunately this was the poor wording that GNUnet chose to use. https://docs.gnunet.org/handbook/gnunet.html#First-steps-_00...

I still facepalm whenever I think about this.

A mesh VPN, or kinda a mesh TOR really.

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