What is Junk Net?¶

Junk Net is a community project with a simple trade at its heart:

Give us the laptop you're not using. Get free storage in return.

Almost every household has one — a laptop that got replaced, got slow, or got a cracked screen, and has been sitting in a drawer ever since. It still works. It still has a perfectly good disk in it. It's just junk now.

Junk Net collects those machines, securely wipes them, and installs an OS image that turns each one into a storage node. The nodes connect to each other over an encrypted mesh network and pool their disks into one big, replicated, S3-compatible object store — a community cloud built entirely from junk.

What you get¶

If you contribute a laptop (or host a node at your place), you get:

• Free S3-compatible object storage — an endpoint and access keys that work with standard tools: rclone, the AWS CLI, Cyberduck, or any S3 client library.
• Replicated durability — every object is stored as three copies on different machines in different homes, so one dead laptop doesn't lose anything.
• A stake in community infrastructure — the cluster belongs to the people who built it, not to a company that can change the price or shut it down.

The principles¶

Junk Net runs on a few non-negotiables:

1. Free means free. No tiers, no trials, no credit card. If you contribute hardware, you get storage. That's the whole business model, which is to say there isn't one.

2. Reuse before recycle. The most sustainable computer is the one that already exists. A laptop only goes to (responsible) recycling when it genuinely can't serve anymore.

3. Open and inspectable. The stack is open source top to bottom — Garage for storage, Nebula for networking, and these docs for everything else. No black boxes.

4. Honest about limits. Junk Net is built from old hardware on home internet connections. It will never out-perform a data centre, and we won't pretend otherwise. What it offers is durability, community ownership, and a price of zero.

The stack, briefly¶

Garage was built by Deuxfleurs specifically for clusters of cheap, mismatched, unreliable machines connected over ordinary internet links — which describes Junk Net exactly. Nebula (from Slack's engineering team) handles the hard networking problems: NAT traversal, certificates, and encrypted connectivity between machines that live behind different home routers.

For the full picture, see How it works.

Who's behind it¶

Junk Net is a community project by Aquainnis, starting in Brisbane, Australia. It's currently in active development — see the roadmap for status, and the Brisbane pilot page if you want in.