Macula - An Ecosystem for Mesh-native Computing
Macula is a mesh network for services and applications, built on Erlang/OTP: a node dials out over QUIC to one or more relay stations, which route its RPC calls, fan out its pub/sub events, and move content and streams between it and everyone else on the mesh. No inbound ports on the client side, no VPN, no central broker any one operator controls. Think of it less as "a client library for my…
Macula is an ecosystem for mesh-native computing. It is built on Erlang/OTP, allowing nodes to dial out over QUIC to relay stations. These stations handle routing, pub/sub events, content and stream movement between nodes on the mesh. There are no inbound ports on the client side, no VPN, and no central broker controlled by any single operator.
Think of it as the internet being a large distributed event bus. The core SDK, macula (v10.14.1 on hex.pm), has been in continuous development since late 2025, with four language ports available: Go, Rust, PHP, and .NET. Macula also includes a CLI, an MCP server, and the relay itself. The SDK focuses on client-side primitives, while macula-station, a separate repo also in Erlang/OTP, handles the relay and routing.
QUIC transport is used for all connections, with outbound-only ports to prevent head-of-line blocking due to slow streams. TLS 1.3 is built-in, and a Rust NIF shares the transport between the SDK and station. Kademlia DHT is used for routing tables, signed TTL records for advertisements, endpoints, and presence. SWIM-Lifeguard handles membership and failure detection, while HyParView + Plumtree is used for pub/sub fan-out and multi-hop RPC relay, preventing an all-to-all problem as the mesh grows.
Content addressing uses BLAKE3-hashed blocks, MCID identifiers, and chunked put/get with discovery. Identity and authorization are handled through Ed25519 keypairs, UCAN capability tokens, DID documents, and NIF-accelerated authorization. macula-station is realm-agnostic, holding no application data and relying on peers for membership and identity.
The platform has been running a multi-station fleet continuously since April 14, 2026, handling various real-world traffic, including DHT, SWIM, pub/sub relay, RPC relay, streaming relay, content transfer, and streaming RPC in both caller and provider roles. Several independent services, such as hecate-services (RAG, LLM gateway, DNS, git, mail), hecate-om (identity, health, capability-advertising), and hecate-whiteboard (real-time collaborative whiteboard), have been built on top of Macula.
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