RABBITHOLE tracker.rabbit.direct [VERIFIED]
RHP SYSTEM PROTOCOL v0.61.0

Down the Rabbit Hole
Reclaim the Digital Underground

A sovereign, Rust-engineered revival of the golden age of online communities—Hotline, KDX, BBSes, and AOL. One server, many doors.

Get Started Browse Burrows
RabbitHole Logo Glowing
<SHATTER THE GLASS>
Active Burrows 11
Swarm Peers 2,453
Looking Glasses 3 Indexes
Active Tunnels 24 S2S

The Sovereign Vision

The modern web is a gated ecosystem of surveillance capitalism. Centralized platforms dictate your interactions, profile your behaviors, and monetize your connections.

RabbitHole is a sanctuary for sovereign digital life. Developed under the umbrella of Mirrorward, we build software that bypasses the modern web's watchtowers. We revive the high-trust, cozy communities of the early internet—the BBS, the dial-up lounge, the pirate server—and fortify them with modern cryptography, high-performance transports, and decentralization.

At the heart of the system is the **Burrow** (server), which you host. Reachable from modern native apps, command lines, PWAs, telnet clients, and classic Hotline tools.

"Down the rabbit hole: a modern Rust revival of the golden age of online communities—one server, many doors."

>_ CORE DESIGN PRINCIPLES

  • 01. Sovereignty: No central authority can index, block, or take down your Burrow. You control your server, configuration, and keys.
  • 02. Multiplicity: Escape the singular, tracked profiles of today. Create multiple personas on a single account, each with distinct identity keys.
  • 03. Verifiable Swarms: Shared files are cryptographically verified chunk-by-chunk using Blake3 event lists and Bao. Fast, resumable P2P downloads.
  • 04. Multi-Protocol Gateway: Native QUIC and WebSockets sit side-by-side with Telnet, Finger, NNTP, Hotline, and Icecast radio.

The RabbitHole Architecture

A decentralized network of self-contained Burrows, federated via Tunnels, indexed by Looking Glasses.

The Burrow

The self-contained server node. Written in Rust for maximum speed and safety. Hosts rooms, message boards, file libraries, and wishing wells, secured by Argon2id credentials and a flexible, object-level ACL engine.

burrow (QUIC / WebSockets)

Looking Glass

A tracker directory network. Burrows submit signed self-certifying descriptors. Looking Glasses gossip these over a UDP anti-entropy protocol to maintain a verifiable directory of node health.

UDP Gossip Indexing

The Warren

A secure swarm file-sharing layer. Content is identified using Blake3/Bao hashes and distributed P2P. Peers request pieces using a work-stealing scheduler governed by signed capability tokens.

rabbit:// (Blake3 Swarm P2P)

Federated Tunnels

Encrypted Server-to-Server (S2S) links. Administrators exchange Ed25519 public keys to form tunnels. Peered servers sync message boards, route cross-server DMs, and replicate files.

RHP-S2S QUIC Tunnels
RHP LOOKING GLASS INDEX

The Looking Glass Directory

Verifiable directory of gossiping Burrows. Inspect descriptors, verify cryptographic keys, and launch console connection.

Gossiping Burrows 11
Swarm Nodes 2,453
Gossip Frequency 60s / UDP
Verification State 100% Signed
🔍

The Legacy Doors

Yesterday's protocols meet today's speeds. RabbitHole exposes your server across multiple vintage interfaces.

CP437 Art & ZMODEM Transfers

Expose your Burrow to terminal clients. Includes a retro welcome screen, chat rooms, message board readers, and a file libraries browser. Supports ZMODEM file transfer in/out with full resume, and DOOR32 door games (e.g., Legend of the Red Dragon).

  • Default Port: 2323
  • Feature Gated: telnet_enabled = true
  • Supports: ANSI/CP437 rendering
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      -- Welcome to Wonderland --
  [C] Chat  [B] Boards  [F] Files  [M] Mail

The Return of Hotline & KDX

Hop on classic Hotline clients (vintage MacOS/Windows) to interact with your modern Burrow. Native support for Hotline accounts, chats, news, and HTXF file transfers with fork-offset resume.

  • Default Ports: 5500 (Control) / 5501 (HTXF)
  • Feature Gated: hotline_enabled = true
  • Client compatibility: Hotline Client v1.23 to v1.9
Hotline Server: wonderland.co
[00:15:32] *** Connected to wonderland.co
[00:15:33] [SysOp] Alice: Welcome back! The Warren is swarming file transfers.
[00:15:34] Hatter: Did we fix the ZMODEM offset yet?
[00:15:35] [SysOp] Alice: Yes, wave 14 landed the fix!

RFC 1288 Presence Queries

Let anyone check who is online on your Burrow and read public profiles directly from their local shells using the traditional `finger` command.

  • Default Port: 7979
  • Query: finger alice@wonderland.co
  • Outputs: Identity key, online presence, and .plan file
$ finger alice@wonderland.co
Login: alice            Name: Alice Liddell
Burrow: wonderland.co   Status: Online (Active)
Identity Key: Ed25519: 7d6c...f4a1
Project: Engineering looking-glass gossip network.
Plan:
- Complete cross-burrow flood-fill logic.
- Drink tea with Mad Hatter at 6:00 PM.

Pirate Radio & ICY Delivery

Incorporate a streaming audio station into your Burrow. RabbitHole handles incoming DJ sources via standard protocols and encodes/delivers ICY streams to listeners' audio players.

  • Default Ports: 8000 (Stream) / 8001 (Ingest)
  • Feature Gated: radio_enabled = true
  • Includes: Live metadata updates & web player
📻 NOW PLAYING: Mirrorward Pirate Radio - Synthwave Mix Vol. 4
⏮ ⏸ ⏭ ICY: 128 kbps / Stereo

Usenet and FTN Integration

Access Burrow message boards via Usenet newsreaders (NNTP) or sync bulletins with FidoNet/binkp networks. Perfect for offline reading and structured mailing list flows.

  • Ports: 1119 (NNTP) / 563 (NNTPS) / 24554 (FTN)
  • Features: Newsreader support, starttls, FTN nodelists
  • Sync format: Signed Blake3 post events
Connecting to news.wonderland.co ...
200 news.wonderland.co RabbitHole NNTP Ready
LIST
215 list of groups follows:
  wonderland.lobby 142 1 y
  wonderland.announcements 12 1 y
  wonderland.wishing-well 54 1 y
.

The Terminal Client

Interact with the RabbitHole network directly from the virtual terminal console below.

RABBITHOLE CLI CLIENT v0.61.0 PING: 22ms
RabbitHole Virtual Terminal Client initialized.
Connecting through the Looking Glass... Status: OK.
Type 'help' for a list of available commands.
Type 'connect' to sign in to the wonderland gateway.
guest@rabbithole:~$

Join the Network

Setting up a Burrow or client is straightforward. Reclaim your digital space in minutes.

🌐

1. Deploy a Burrow (Server)

Run a sovereign server to host chats, boards, files, wishing wells, and radio. You can compile it from source or spin up a lightweight Docker container.

# Install Burrow Server via Cargo $ cargo install rabbithole-burrow # Or run using Docker $ docker run -d -p 4653:4653/udp -p 4654:4654 mirrorward/burrow

Minimal Config (burrow.toml)

server_name = "alice@wonderland" quic_addr = "0.0.0.0:4653" ws_addr = "0.0.0.0:4654" http_enabled = true telnet_enabled = true
View Config Example
💻

2. Choose Your Client

Connect to any Burrow using native RHP clients. Use the command line client, TUI dashboards, or install the embedded Leptos PWA from your browser.

# Install rabbit CLI $ cargo install rabbithole-cli # Install rabbit TUI (Server browser + Chat) $ cargo install rabbithole-tui

Supported Client Surfaces

  • ⚡ `rabbit` CLI: Command-line chat, files, and wishing well manager.
  • 🖥️ `rabbit-tui`: Beautiful console interface with server uptime graphs.
  • 🌐 Web App (PWA): Leptos-based web interface served automatically.
  • ☎️ Telnet / Hotline: Dial in with NetTerm, classic Hotline Client v1.23, or KDX.
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