When VluxNet grows up

Energy and infrastructure

Picture this: you’re at the office, your colleague is three rooms away. You send them an email with a photo or document attached. What happens technically: your mail goes to your mail server — often at a provider in Frankfurt. It’s processed, forwarded to the recipient’s mail server, which is often located in Ireland or the US. There it’s cached, possibly analysed by spam scanners and archival systems, then delivered. Attachments often stay in mailboxes and backup systems for years — for a file that was needed two rooms away.

What VluxNet does differently

VluxNet transfers directly between devices on the LAN. The bytes don’t leave the company network. There’s no intermediate storage on foreign servers and no permanent cloud storage after the handover is done.

Three effects

1. Direct LAN transfer — no internet backbone load for internal handovers.
2. No permanent cloud storage — after the handover, the file only sits where it belongs.
3. Less redundant backups — cloud providers keep data in multiple data centres, with 1.3× to 1.5× storage overhead.

Order of magnitude

The individual saving looks small. With broad adoption the leverage becomes clearer: a substantial share of today’s cloud storage infrastructure exists exclusively to handle short-term file handovers between colleagues — storage that wouldn’t actually be needed because the file isn’t actively used by sender or recipient after the handover. If this share goes away, data centres have to be built out less in total.

A concrete projection at national or global level would be speculation here. What can be said responsibly: the order of magnitude is significant enough not to be ignored — and the effect appears with no extra effort for the user.

The missing link

Anyone trying to regain data sovereignty over their sensitive data today already finds good open-source alternatives for most building blocks: LibreOffice instead of Word, Thunderbird instead of Outlook, Jitsi instead of Teams, Linux instead of Windows, Nextcloud Office instead of SharePoint. Yet most businesses stay on the big cloud suites. Why? Because one layer is missing — the bridge between the devices.

What was missing

The job that OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox and Google Drive handle today is everyday: exchange files between devices and colleagues, keep shared folders, collect backups. Most open-source alternatives fail right here — they’re complex, need server admins, aren’t made for non-tech teams. A lean, usable, P2P-oriented bridge was missing.

What VluxNet delivers

VluxNet closes that gap. It complements existing open-source stacks rather than replacing them. And it makes leaving the cloud realistic for non-tech users for the first time — without an IT department, without monthly training sessions, without anyone having to become a hobby server admin.

If VluxNet works as the missing link, full data sovereignty becomes practically feasible for many businesses and individuals for the first time. That’s more than a feature extension — it’s the completion of a movement that has been waiting for years for a business-grade P2P bridge.

VluxNet goes a step further than most alternatives: connections are first attempted directly — on the LAN, over IPv6, via NAT hole punching. Only when all three direct paths fail does a tunnel or relay come into play. That’s not just more consistent P2P, it also means: central servers are barely needed in practice.

A bot-free human network

Online communication is increasingly infiltrated by AI bots. On social media, in forums, in inboxes, it’s getting harder to tell real humans from automated systems. Whoever wants to be recognized as a real human has hardly any reliable mechanisms for that today.

How VluxNet addresses this

VluxNet offers an optional ID verification. On first setup the user can verify themselves as a real human — through an established procedure using the German ID card. This verification is stored cryptographically in the profile and can be checked by communication partners.

What this means

Inside VluxNet a user can be sure: their conversation partner is a verified real human, not a bot. That’s a niche aspect today. The moment AI-generated bot floods make the public internet increasingly unusable, a verified human network becomes valuable.

This is an option today, not an urgent need. We’re building the feature because it’s becoming clear that it will be needed — probably not tomorrow, but in a few years. Whoever helps build it will be there when the human internet emerges.