Nekotopia has been around since 2022, but you'd struggle to tell from the outside. The work happens in a private repository, in session notes and on the routers themselves, and almost none of it has been visible. This blog is where that changes.
An SGI Challenge S, collected from the UK in person, took its first member logins over SSH. Before that, a member's slow tunnel turned into an audit of how bandwidth limits are applied everywhere. And we worked out what Nekotopia actually is and rewrote the site to say it.
We're building a native iPhone and iPad app for Nekotopia. It isn't a VPN app: WireGuard stays in its own app, as it should. This one is a console for your account, showing what your tunnel is doing, what you've used, what's switched on, and the bTen machines. Here's where it stands, including what isn't finished.
July was quiet, and we'd rather say so than pad it out. August meant a trip to the UK to collect an SGI Challenge S and an Indy, and a close read of everything the site says: the copy rewritten in plain English, contradictions between pages fixed, and the homepage rebuilt around the problem that actually brings people here.
A member's own router peered with us and announced its own prefix, end to end, for the first time. The looking glass was rebuilt, and the site stopped asking anyone for money.
The busiest fortnight so far: a public looking glass and a public wiki, self-service DNS and BGP, nColo moving onto our own ASN, a fairer bandwidth model, and uptime history on the status page. It was also the fortnight we spent the most time finding our own mistakes, so the "what broke" list is long.
The first half of May was mostly small breakages caught and closed the same day, and one piece of housekeeping that mattered more than it looked: every hub router's licence brought current and put on automatic renewal. The website briefly became a three-product catalogue.
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.
The platform code moved into a fresh repository in late February, and March was spent making every hub the same: one design, BGP between regions, a second route reflector, and nColo as a self-service product. We also ran our own security review and fixed what it found.
The session logs start in March 2026, but Nekotopia doesn't. This is the short version of the four years before that, from a domain registration to a five-hub mesh announcing its own address space.