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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

it’s been “new” fir as long as i have known about it, over 5 years or so? or is this a different thing?

Doesn't look that active either. It unfortunately seems like there isn't a great use case for these networks that will adopt usage through the hurdles

Tailscale somehow found use for self-hosters, despite being wildly unergonomic for an all-Linux, non-corporate, network. Yggdrasil lacks marketing effort, but is otherwise a great option.

I actually use Yggdrasil in lieu of Tailscale because I love the idea of a decentralized routing system.

I never understand why people enjoy having a centralized control plane.

easier to implement and understand

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but assuming you're not: Tailscale makes security easier because networks are private by default. To achieve a similar effect with Yggdrasil you'd have to use a firewall to whitelist the Yggdrasil IPs of all your devices. So it's more work to set up.

You have to use a firewall anyway. If you use Tailscale, you have two firewalls, which is not strictly easier.

Huh? I thought one of the appeals of Tailscale is that security is done at the network level; plus that your network is private, so you don't get randos knocking at your ports.

What does “at the network level” mean?..

Anyway; Tailscale is not your only network. If you’re on a laptop, you need to be able to log onto rando wifi networks. If you’re at home, you need to be mindful of your smart fridge going rogue. You need to run a firewall. Tailscale adds a separate, Tailscale-specific, firewall with centralized management. Now you have two firewalls.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, that's true; you'd still need a firewall for LAN.

> What does “at the network level” mean?..

I meant the normal non-Tailscale firewall (e.g. iptables).

I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.

The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"

It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying. There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local

Also see CJDNS, darknet project and hyperboria

Actually, could anyone compare this to cjdns? On the surface they seem pretty similar. Docs say:

> Yggdrasil was created in order to build a decentralised routing scheme for mesh networks that can potentially operate at a global scale, motivated in particular by significant performance and scaling issues that were present in cjdns at the time.

( https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/faq.html )

but that was a while back; where do they stand today?

I always thought of them as the same.basic idea, but CJD went on to make a network crypto thing that I never really understood.

Ygg and cjdns are the same from a cosmetic point of view just different developers.

IMO ygg is easy to install, cjdns was adding some new dev things that complicated the non developer experience, but that was a few years ago

I mean, it just had a release in Feb 2026, version 0.5.13.

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