Rymnet is a privacy-first layer of the internet, built to run without asking anyone's permission — not a platform's, not a company's, not a gatekeeper's. It is a network of self-replicating, cryptographically verified nodes and client software that let people publish, search, and communicate without a central server anyone can own, subpoena, throttle, or shut down by pulling one plug.
The problem
The internet most people use today runs through a small number of platforms that sit between every reader and every writer. Those platforms decide what you see, log what you do, monetize your attention, and can revoke your account, your audience, or your income with no appeal. None of that is a law of physics — it is a business model, and business models can be built differently.
What Rymnet actually is
Not a company, not a hosted service, not an app you sign up for. Rymnet is open software — a CLI (rym), a peer daemon (rymnetd), an interactive shell (rymsh), a graphical desktop (rymwin), and a browser-based terminal (rymweb) — that anyone can run on their own machine to become a full, equal participant in the network. There is no Rymnet, Inc. standing behind a login wall. The software is the whole system.
Trust cryptography, not a company's word
Rymnet's one rule, load-bearing everywhere: never trust content from a peer unless signatures and hashes verify. In practice:
- Every node has its own Ed25519 identity. Every domain you publish under (
yourname.rym) is a signed claim, first-come-first-served, the same way a person claims it — not granted by a registrar you have to trust. - Every published site is content-addressed and BLAKE3-hashed chunk by chunk. A node serving you a page re-verifies the claim, the manifest signature, and every chunk hash on every request — it never just trusts its own disk.
- Peer-to-peer traffic is Noise-encrypted end to end.
- Your personal account — files, mail, everything in your virtual computer — is encrypted client-side with a key derived from your own username and password before it ever leaves your machine. Peers that store your data for you, the same way they replicate sites, only ever see ciphertext. Nobody hosting your data can read it, including the people hosting it.
- Mail is sealed with public-key encryption addressed to you alone and signed by the sender's identity, with no mail server, no MX record, and no central directory in the middle.
Nothing above is a promise about how someone will behave. It's math that doesn't require anyone to behave well in the first place.
No central point to pressure
There is no company that can be bought, no server that can be seized to take the whole network down, no admin panel with a kill switch over what other people publish. Content lives wherever it's been replicated, and it keeps being reachable anywhere that replication has already reached — not from one origin server that a single order or outage can erase. Log in with the same username and password on any machine running the software and you reach the same encrypted virtual computer, with no central account server standing in the middle of that handoff.
No ads, no algorithm, no tracking, by construction
Published sites are static HTML and CSS — nothing else is allowed to run. No JavaScript means no ad networks, no engagement-optimizing feed, no fingerprinting scripts, no third-party trackers riding along on every page view. Search (search.rym) is a plain index over what's actually been published and signed — no crawl of the wider web, no ranking tuned to keep you scrolling, no data collected about what you searched for. You get pages, and links, and what you actually asked for.
Software you can run, not a service you have to trust
Anyone can install the same binaries, initialize their own node, and become a full peer — not a customer, not a user account inside someone else's system. rymwin gives you a graphical desktop with a file manager, a code editor, a browser, a terminal, and mail. RymScript lets you write and run your own small programs against a sandboxed API, on your own machine, without asking anyone's platform for permission to build something and publish it.
Honest about where this stands
This is early, working software, not a finished product wearing a manifesto for marketing. Peer discovery is still manual. Propagation only reaches wherever your configured peers' peers actually connect. There is no gossip layer that finds the whole network for you yet. These are real, current limits, not hidden ones — and they are the kind of gaps that get closed by more people running nodes, not by a company deciding to ship a feature.
Join it
There is nothing to sign up for. Install the binaries, run rym init, connect to a peer, and you are the network — not a visitor to it. See Getting Started for the first five commands.