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The Brisbane pilot

Every network starts somewhere. Junk Net starts in Brisbane, Australia — with a handful of rescued laptops, a couple of homes, and the goal of proving the whole idea works outside of documentation.

What the pilot is trying to prove

The pilot is Phase 1 of the roadmap, and it has concrete questions to answer:

  • Durability in the wild. Do three zone-separated replicas on old hardware actually ride out the churn of real households — power cuts, NBN dropouts, someone's toddler pressing the shiny button?
  • Bandwidth reality. How does replication and healing traffic feel on real Brisbane home internet plans? Where do we need to throttle?
  • The host experience. Is hosting a node genuinely set-and-forget, or does it nag? (It must be set-and-forget.)
  • The contributor experience. From "here's my old laptop" to "here are my access keys" — how short can we make that path?

How to get involved

The pilot needs three things, in this order:

  1. Laptops. Working-ish, 64-bit, 100 GB+ disk — see what we can use. Cosmetic damage welcome.

  2. Host households. A power point, a network connection, and a shelf. Every new household is a new zone, and zones are what make the replication story real.

  3. Curious people. The operator docs are written to be followed by anyone comfortable with a terminal. If you want to learn distributed storage by helping run some, this is a rare, friendly sandbox.

Get in touch

Tell us what you've got — machine specs if you know them, or just "three old Dells of unknown vintage" if you don't. Drop-off/pick-up is arranged per-donation while the pilot is small.

Pilot expectations, plainly

During the pilot the cluster is experimental. Storage allocations are modest, things will occasionally be rebuilt, and everything in Trust & safety — no SLA, keep another copy of anything precious — applies double. Early contributors are co-conspirators, not customers. That's the fun of it.

After Brisbane

The end-state isn't one big Brisbane cluster — it's a playbook any community can run: docs, a node image, and a governance template that let a suburb, a school, a hackerspace, or a country town stand up their own Junk Net with their own junk. Brisbane is just the first community, and the one that gets to make all the interesting mistakes.