A decentralized network. No account, no central authority, no personal data.

almena.network

A decentralized network, peer-to-peer over iroh, and almena is the application at the centre of it: one codebase — Tauri 2, Rust, React — for Windows, macOS and Linux. The application is the node: there is no daemon beside it and no API between the two, and the network is composed of the computers taking part in it.

Almena on a phone or a tablet is a client of that network rather than a node of it, and it is built separately, in client.

A participant is a key generated on its own device. There is no account and no sign-up, and nothing ever asks who is behind it.

A node reads its first configuration from an origin — almena.network for production, dev.almena.network for development — published in DNS there and signed, so a zone the project runs hands a node a document and never a decision. The origin is the operator's to replace, and a node that can still reach somebody it has spoken to never asks again. Which network a node is actually on is decided by the protocol name it offers when it greets another node, not by the origin it read: the origin is only where its first addresses came from.

Under construction. No release has been published, and the peer-to-peer layer is not written yet: a build today joins no network, and its first screen says exactly that.

• Transparency. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no update ping, in any build — a program of ours contacts only hosts its operator asked for. What is not built yet is stated on the screen rather than invented.
• Anonymity. A key on a device, and no name of ours above it.
• No personal data. Never stored — not encrypted, not hashed, not temporarily.
• Traceability. Every document that matters is signed and checkable offline by anyone holding it, traceable to a key and no further.

Two standing decisions travel with them: no central authority — switching off everything the project runs leaves the network running for everybody already on it, and costs new nodes the one thing it is for, which is finding a first peer through us instead of through somebody who already has one — and IPv6 only, with no second address family and no traversal machinery of any kind. A node listens on a global address or it dials out and holds what it made; both take part in full, and which one a node is gets measured rather than assumed.

Each repository's own README is the source of truth for what it needs and how to build and run it. The project's working agreements — the rules the code is held to — live in a repository of their own, almena-network.