Gossip & Presence

Tunnet uses a gossip protocol (iroh-gossip) alongside the control plane for real-time peer presence. Each network has a gossip topic derived from its ID. Peers join the topic and broadcast their status.

Why gossip alongside the control plane?

The control plane provides authoritative configuration (peer lists, policies, routes), but it operates on a polling interval (default 30 seconds). Gossip provides sub-second presence updates - you know immediately when a peer comes online or goes offline.

The dashboard also connects to a presence SSE stream to show live machine status.

Bootstrap

When an agent starts, the network snapshot includes a gossip_bootstrap list of peer endpoint IDs. The agent uses these to join the gossip topic and begin receiving presence updates.