a47ddbd5a5
Carries the v0.4.1 content up the one-way branch flow. The release itself belongs to maint, so the parts of this merge that identify a version are resolved in master's favor and the parts that describe the project's state are taken from maint. Kept master's: Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock at 0.5.0-dev, the README status badge, and the "FIPS is at v0.5.0-dev on the master branch" line. A patch release consumes no minor version and master's development line is unaffected by it. Took from maint: the bloom antipoison FPR default change and the duplicate-definition fix it rests on, the two docs that describe them, the new v0.4.1 release notes, the correction to the v0.4.0 release date, and the [0.4.1] changelog section, which slots below master's own [Unreleased] and above [0.4.0]. The root RELEASE-NOTES.md mirror moves to v0.4.1 because it tracks the latest shipped release, which also clears the stale provisional date it had been carrying. One line needed splitting rather than choosing: the README said "v0.4.0 has shipped" inside the paragraph that identifies master as 0.5.0-dev. The version identity stays master's and the shipped-release pointer moves to v0.4.1. Quartet green on the result: 1645 tests passed, clippy clean with -D warnings.
FIPS Documentation
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports — local networks, the public internet, Tor, Bluetooth, or point-to-point links — without central infrastructure.
With FIPS, your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity. There are two ways to deploy it.
As an overlay on top of existing IP networks, FIPS lets your node reach any other FIPS node wherever it sits — behind a NAT, on a different ISP, on a phone over cellular, on a laptop with only Bluetooth in range, or behind a Tor onion. The mesh forwards IPv6 traffic transparently and end-to-end encrypted, with no central VPN concentrator or coordinating server.
From the ground up over raw Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth, FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS. Any node that joins the link gets routable IPv6 addresses, peer discovery, and a path to every other node automatically.
Either way, existing networking software runs over it unchanged: SSH, HTTP servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native works the same way it would on a local network.
New to FIPS? Start with the Getting Started guide.
Documentation Sections
Tutorials
If you are starting from scratch and want a guided path to a working mesh, go here.
How-To Guides
If you have a specific task in mind — enabling a feature, deploying a component, diagnosing a problem — go here.
Reference
If you need to look up wire formats, configuration keys, command flags, or counter inventories, go here.
Design
If you want to understand how the mesh self-organizes, why FIPS makes the choices it does, or how the pieces fit together, go here.