The Walkaway-Stack describes a peer-to-peer system where applications remain functional even if the underlying "event delivery" infrastructure changes. This enables seamless transitions between different network types—whether moving from a "connected" Internet stack to a "connectionless" mesh network, or from radio protocols to sneakernets, and vice versa. In this way, applications are decoupled from the underlying network, giving users the autonomy to choose their preferred infrastructure.

In this presentation, I'll explore the space more broadly—examining why it's so exciting, why it's not fully solved yet, and where things currently stand. Hopefully, this will also reveal a theoretical overlap between "mesh protocols" and "overlay networks," which may actually be more closely related than we realize.

Background

This lecture will be a compressed version of the "p2p lecture series" I've been then running bi-weekly in our community space "offline" in Berlin: https://pads.offline.place/p/r.06dda241c03ad92f2a55c47f4bbdd419