Free and open source · Apache-2.0 / MIT · specs-first

Own your corner
of the internet.

An open protocol stack where your identity is a keypair you generated, your work is signed by your own keys, and being human is a credential you carry everywhere. No platform in the middle. Ever.

The problem

You've been building on rented land.

The internet was built for information, then for attention — never for people and their work.

01 / identity

Your name belongs to a database

Every account you've ever had is a row in someone else's table — revocable at any time, for any reason, with no appeal. When the account goes, your history, reputation, and relationships go with it.

02 / work

Your output is held hostage

Writing, code, research, reputation — scattered across platforms that monetize them and can erase them. Export tools produce dumps nothing else can read. Leaving means starting over.

03 / trust

Every site fights the bots alone

CAPTCHAs, fingerprinting, dark patterns — because there is no shared answer to "is this a human?" The costs land on real people. The bots get through anyway.

The protocol

Software freedom, all the way down.

Not an app you join — a protocol you run. Six principles, specified in the open, built by consensus.

identity

The keypair is the identity

Generated on your machine from entropy you control. No issuer, no registrar, no fallback email. You cannot be deplatformed from a name you cryptographically own.

place

A place, not a profile

Your identity's canonical surface is your personal website — self-hosted or managed, movable with a DNS change. What humans read and what machines verify live on one origin you control.

work

The record is yours

Every action is a signed, append-only, hash-chained entry. Tamper-evident history with permanent attribution — Git's model, applied to everything you make.

humanity

Humans verify humans

Verification is earned from peers — vouching chains, periodic re-checks, clique-resistant attestations. Defeating it means corrupting a social fabric, not cracking an algorithm.

discourse

Publication is unconditional

Anyone may publish anything at any time; no gatekeeper can prevent it. What a claim is worth is computed by every reader from signed evidence — never decreed by a feed.

economics

Infrastructure, not middleman

No ads. No tracking. No data selling. No fees on person-to-person exchange. Free for individuals, forever. The network exists to move value between people, not extract it.

The first application

A social medium that behaves like a peer-reviewed journal.

a

Every post carries proof of ownership

Signed by the author's keys, chained into their history, anchored for tamper-evidence. Authorship that no platform can revoke and no repost can blur.

b

Citations with consequences

A citation either supports or disputes a specific claim — and requires a written rationale. It's signed, public, permanent, and itself citable. Reviews are speech acts, not likes.

c

Standing, not algorithms

Validity is computed locally by every reader from the signed citation graph — weighted by verified humanity, collapsed across coordinated mobs. One human, one voice. No ranking oracle anywhere.

UNREVIEWED UNDER REVIEW VALIDATED CONTESTED REFUTED

The stack

Six layers, specified before they are coded.

Every protocol decision is a public document in specs/. Code follows specs. Consensus over velocity.

SIP-1Identity V0 SHIPPED Ed25519 keypairs, BIP-39 + hierarchical derivation, hash-chained Key Event Log, self-certifying did:sip, DID documents. Reference implementation in Rust, 13 tests.
SIP-2User DRAFT Profiles, verification tiers earned through attestations, consent flags, the verified peer graph.
SIP-3Network DRAFT Witness mirrors, mesh transport, discovery, consent-gated message delivery between nodes.
SIP-4Credentials DRAFT W3C Verifiable Credentials in a wallet on your own server — selective disclosure, revocable, portable.
SIP-5Recovery DRAFT Shamir-shared recovery with guardians and dry-runs — because an identity you can lose to a dropped phone isn't sovereign.
SIP-6Discourse DRAFT Posts, structured claims, signed citations, emergent standing — the journal layer. Brigading farms move a score by 0.05.

The pledge

What we will never build.

The strongest commitments are the ones you can verify in the source.

[x]

Free and open source, forever. Apache-2.0 / MIT. Every line auditable, every protocol decision a public document.

[x]

No ads, no tracking, no data selling. Your server is yours. There is no analytics in the protocol because there is no "us" watching.

[x]

No fees on person-to-person exchange. The network is infrastructure, like roads and DNS — not a landlord.

[x]

No lock-in. Identities are portable keypairs; moving providers is a DNS update, not a re-onboarding.

[x]

No hidden algorithms. Ranking and standing policies are published data objects you can inspect, share, or discard.

[x]

No requirement to trust us. Verification is cryptographic and local. Trust is earned from peers, never delegated to a company.

Get involved

Read the specs. Run the code.
Shape the protocol.

This is not a startup chasing growth. It is infrastructure being built for people — and it needs its people.