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irdest is a decentralised networking project, aiming to create easy-to-use solutions for ad-hoc wireless communication. It supports many common desktop operating systems (Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, …), and Android mobile phones. iOS support is on the roadmap.
irdest is both a cross-platform application, implementing messaging, filesharing, and voice calls, but also a development toolkit to create fully decentralised third-party applications.
In order to be able to run on unpriviledged mobile platforms irdest implements decentralised routing protocols and utilities entirely in userspace. The codebase is largely written in Rust, with only a few compatibility components being written in more platform specific languages. All parts of the project are contained in this repository.
Following is an overview of the available components. Components have additional information in their respective README files.
Component | Description |
---|---|
clients | irdest end-user applications for various platforms |
docs | Manuals (for both users and developers), and tools to build and deploy documentation |
irdest-core | Core library of the irdest ecosystem. Provides networking abstractions, user management and discovery |
licenses | Set of license texts that are in use in this repository |
netmods | Platform-specific networking interface drivers |
nix | Nix related build utilities |
ratman | A decentralised and modular userspace frame router |
rpc-core | Core components of the qrpc development system |
sdk | Software Development Kit libraries for third-party developers |
services | A collection of services that use irdest as their network backend. Some are part of the irdest clients, others are development examples |
utils | Various utilities in use all over the repository that don't fit in anywhere else |
Overview
Most traditional networking infrastructure (both the transmission layer, as well as applications) operate in a centralised way. Clients connect to servers, and devices to towers. This makes the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks. Natural disasters or opressive governments can easily shut down communication for millions of people, potentially putting them at risk, and slowing down or disrupting any organisation or activist movement.
Irdest aims to solve this issue by creating decentralised circuits between devices directly. These direct device-to-device connections can be imperfect and unstable. irdest's routing approach takes these issues into account by caching undelivered messages, and carrying them towards their destination until the receipient comes back online.
Routing in a irdest network is done via a user's ed25519 public keys, creating a 32 byte large address space. Connecting devices together happens via channel-specific drivers (for example the tcp internet overlay). Therefore when creating a circuit, roaming between different connection types is normal, and no single technology has to work on all possible devices.
To learn more about the technical side of irdest, check out the developer manual.
How to use
There's no single way to use irdest. Various platforms support different clients, and an irdest network can consist of many different components interacting with each other. To get started, check out the user manual!
Contributing
Social processes, code, and design guidelines are outlined in the developer manual. We have a developer chat hosted on Matrix where we would be happy to answer any questions you have.
If you want some inspiration for what you can do with irdest, check out the services section.
License
Irdest is free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later.
Additional Permissions: For Submission to the Apple App Store:
Provided that you are otherwise in compliance with the AGPLv3 for each covered work you convey (including without limitation making the Corresponding Source available in compliance with Section 6 of the AGPLv3), the irdest developers also grant you the additional permission to convey through the Apple App Store non-source executable versions of the Program as incorporated into each applicable covered work as Executable Versions only under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0.
A copy of both the AGPL-3.0 and MPL-2.0 license texts are included in this repository, along other external licenses for third-party code, and can be found in the licenses directory.