Junkmesh

Junkmesh

No masters. No lighthouses. Just mesh.

Boot one ISO on any x86 machine and it becomes a node in a community-owned, S3-compatible storage cloud with no central infrastructure at all. An encrypted Yggdrasil mesh for the network, Garage for replicated storage, metrics built in — three lightweight Alpine services, no containers, no one in charge.

Get the ISO How it works

Your node is your membership. There is no service to sign up to, no account, and nobody hosting anything on your behalf — this site and the ISO download are static files, and that's all the project provides. To be part of Junkmesh, you host a node: your own hardware, in your own home, holding replicas for the cluster. In return the cluster holds replicas for you. No node, no membership — that's not a rule anyone enforces, it's just how the thing works.

How you join

1 Boot the ISO on your machine

Any x86 laptop from the last ~15 years. Write the image to USB, boot, run junkmesh-setup. The disk is wiped and the machine becomes your node.

2 Cluster with people you trust

Peer over the mesh, share a cluster secret out-of-band, and existing members admit your node explicitly. Three households make a resilient cluster.

3 Storage that outlives hardware

Every object is replicated to three nodes in different homes. Your disk dies, your house floods — your data doesn't care. S3-compatible, works with rclone, restic, anything.

The stack

Junkmesh is an experimental, truly decentralised sibling of Junk Net. Junk Net's overlay (Nebula) needs a certificate authority and lighthouse servers — someone has to run those. Junkmesh replaces that layer with Yggdrasil, where every node's address is its cryptographic identity and nothing needs to be signed, registered or blessed by anyone.

• Network layer — Yggdrasil

  A self-certifying IPv6 address per node, encrypted end-to-end, zero-config peering on a LAN, self-organising routing everywhere else.

• Storage layer — Garage

  S3-compatible object storage built for flaky, mismatched, second-hand hardware. Three replicas of everything, one per household.

• Access control — three rings

  Firewall at the node, shared secret + explicit admission at the cluster, per-bucket S3 keys for data. The open mesh grants nothing by itself.

• The installer ISO

  Alpine Linux, ~390 MB, boots BIOS or UEFI. One command turns a retired laptop into a node. Build it yourself if you prefer.

• Observability built in

  Every node serves Prometheus metrics and a JSON status API. Watch your mesh from Grafana, New Relic or anything OTLP — self-hosted, of course.

• Lightweight by design

  Three static Go binaries as plain OpenRC services. No Docker, no Kubernetes — a 2 GB laptop from 2012 is a first-class citizen.

Experimental

Junkmesh is a research spike, not a product. It has not had a security review, the cluster tooling is manual, and the ISO is rebuilt frequently with breaking changes. Don't put the only copy of anything on it yet. For the dependable community pilot, see Junk Net.

Why bother?

Four reasons: sustainability (ten more years of service is the greenest computing there is), cost (host a node, get storage — no bills), sovereignty (your data lives in homes you can visit, not a hyperscaler's billing system), and resilience (no CA to seize, no lighthouse to unplug, no company to fold). Read more in Why Junkmesh.