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April 2026: the mesh becomes the backbone

April retired the cloud transit layer between regions, so traffic between hubs now runs over our own WireGuard and BGP mesh and nothing else. nColo spread to Ohio and Singapore, signups got abuse protection that doesn't depend on a third party, and vintage browsers got a proper way onto the modern web.

Written up afterwards

Written in September 2026 from our session notes and commit history, and dated to the end of the period it covers.

What shipped

4–5 Apr: nColo in three regions. Ohio joined London with its own prefix pool and cross-region routing, then Singapore followed. Dedicated public addresses (nSolo) opened up to Plus members as well as Pro.

4 Apr: the funding page. Rebuilt to show where the money goes and how the project got here, from registering the domain in 2022 to the address allocations behind nSolo and nColo.

12 Apr: the transit layer retired. The mesh became the only path between regions. One less moving part, one less thing to fail, and a noticeably smaller bill.

14 Apr: signup protection without a CAPTCHA company. A self-hosted proof-of-work challenge and disposable-address filtering. We also closed a path that let one kind of signup approve itself without verification. Genuine signups see no extra friction.

29 Apr: a real proxy for old browsers. Browservice is something you visit; it isn't a proxy. So we added WRP, an image-map rendering proxy, for machines whose browsers need an actual HTTP proxy setting. Netscape- and IE3-era browsers can reach the modern web either way.

Also in April:

  • Our public geofeed (RFC 8805) restored after it went missing in a migration, so services locate our addresses correctly.
  • sgai moved to proper HTTPS, became reachable from outside again, and got a visual overhaul.
  • The echo page got a retro makeover.

What broke, and what we fixed

  • Stale rules on reused addresses. A member reconnecting on a mesh address someone else had used before could be silently blocked by the previous holder's leftover rules. Cleaned up.
  • A hardening change that broke DNS. A security change on 12 April broke DNS and basic connectivity for members on hubs other than London. Caught and fixed the same day.
  • A VPN toggle that switched itself back on. Turning your VPN off in the dashboard could flip back to on a few seconds later. A timing bug; fixed.
  • The top bandwidth option did nothing. A rounding mismatch meant the server rejected the highest slider position. Fixed.

By the numbers

64 changes to the platform repository in April.