Project status: FRED is an active project under development. The overall architecture and hardware direction are established, but some parts are still being integrated, tested and refined. Not every feature described here is yet available as a finished, proven package.
Think of FRED as a little communications box in your house that you actually own. The hardware is yours — not rented from FRED — and your phone or tablet connects to it over Wi-Fi, much like it connects to your home router. There is no required FRED account, monthly subscription, paid messaging plan, advertising profile or FRED business model built around selling your communications data. Once you buy the hardware, FRED itself is free to use.
Your household data and identity do not need to depend on one central FRED cloud service for the network to function. FRED is designed to use encrypted, community-owned communications paths where the underlying protocols support them. If ordinary Internet access is available, FRED can use it as another path. If it disappears, nearby FRED nodes can still communicate over whatever local radio or network links the community has built. Optional services you choose to connect, such as an ordinary Internet connection, can still have their own costs.
A much smaller trust surface. FRED is deliberately built around a different security model from ordinary centralized communications services. The network uses cryptographic identities and encrypted communications, and it does not require a provider sitting in the middle of every conversation, a central FRED account database, or an advertising system watching what you do. Local traffic can stay on community-owned paths instead of automatically passing through distant company infrastructure. That removes entire layers of routine collection, profiling and central control.
That does not mean a radio becomes physically invisible or that a stolen or compromised device becomes harmless. Radio links can still be detected or jammed and endpoints still have to be protected. Those are residual physical and device risks — not an admission that FRED has the same exposure as an ordinary centralized Internet service.
Send messages, receive messages after being temporarily offline, join a local community space, read notices and emergency information, share local pages and files, use maps and local information, and make voice calls when the available link has enough capacity.
No for local FRED communication. Internet access is useful when available, but it is treated as one possible route rather than the thing that gives FRED permission to exist.
That is specifically what FRED is trying to avoid. The normal household setup should be: mount the antenna, connect the supplied pieces, turn it on, scan a setup code and use it.
You own your household equipment and data. A community owns the relays, links and shared infrastructure it builds. There is no single company that has to own the entire network.
The Commons is the local town square: messages, notices, help, maps, community information, local files and other useful things so a new network has somewhere to go immediately.
Your Castle is your household's own place on the network. It is local storage you control for your pages, files, messages, backups and optional services instead of automatically putting all of that on somebody else's cloud.
The small indoor box your phone connects to. It runs the household FRED services, connects the radio and holds your removable Castle storage.
Current hardware direction: GL.iNet Slate AX class.
The radio that lets the house reach other community nodes without depending on a cellular tower or ordinary Internet connection.
Current direction: enclosed RAK4631/RNode, Canada-appropriate 915 MHz hardware.
The outdoor antenna and everything needed to connect it properly: coax, mast, lightning protection, grounding parts, weatherproof entry, tape and fasteners.
A connector diagram, setup QR code, installation template and recovery information. The normal homeowner should not need a command line.
Direct messages, delayed messages when somebody is temporarily offline, and community discussion rooms.
Local notices, emergency information, help pages, community directories and announcements.
Maps, weather, marine information, instructions, forms and locally useful files can be available without depending on a public website.
Manuals, public documents, reference material and offline information archives can remain available inside the community.
You can choose to publish a page, useful files, notices, links or other small services from your own household node.
Private files, messages, backups and application data stay local unless you explicitly choose to share them.
Castle storage is removable local media. Your household data is not automatically turned into a rented cloud account.
You use ordinary screens on your phone or tablet. The complicated networking underneath should stay underneath.
FRED can use different kinds of connection for different jobs: long-range low-bandwidth radio, local Wi-Fi, Ethernet, fibre, and eventually other community wireless links.
RNode · OpenWrt · LibreMesh · LoRa · Wi-Fi
Reticulum is the main network underneath FRED. It gives devices cryptographic identities, finds paths and lets the same application work across different kinds of links.
Existing projects already provide messaging, voice, pages, files, community rooms, maps and diagnostics. FRED integrates those rather than rewriting them.
LXMF · LXST · Nomad · RRC · MeshChatX
FRED is not the only way to build community communications. guifi.net, Freifunk, NYC Mesh, MeshCore, Meshtastic, AlterMundi, Zenzeleni and many others are part of the wider ecosystem.
FRED is assembled from upstream hardware and open projects. These links go directly to the people who make and maintain the pieces: specifications, manuals, source code, troubleshooting and support.
FRED documentation explains how these pieces fit together. For model-specific faults, firmware behaviour and upstream bugs, the manufacturer/project links above are the authoritative place to check first.
FRED is our community-owned communications project. Outernet Search is its human-curated catalogue of useful open, independent, privacy-respecting and self-hostable projects, including the wider mesh-network ecosystem FRED is built from.
It is not a general-purpose search engine. The catalogue remains deliberately selective: the point is to find useful projects, understand how they fit together, and make it much easier to discover community-owned alternatives.