Introduction #

Noosphere is a protocol for a new kind of content web:

• Protocol: Noosphere is a common set of rules that support open-ended applications to be built on top of them.
• Content web: Noosphere is like the web; you can use it to publish files and link to them across the network.

At a high level, Noosphere has two features that make it a useful web protocol:

• Content space: Noosphere provides a space for users to save arbitrary kinds of files against human-readable names, much like a filesystem; these can be published to the network.
• Address book: Noosphere users keep an address book that contains other users or programs that they follow, enabling human-readable links to content that may traverse nodes in the network.

In other words: Noosphere enables hyperlinks. Hyperlinks in Noosphere typically look like this:

Principles #

Noosphere aims to promote decentralization in the network by designing around the following principles:

• Simplicity: Noosphere delivers simple primitives that enable complex applications
• Evolvability: Noosphere may be adapted and used in ways we can't yet imagine
• Subsidiarity: Noosphere privileges governance at the level of close-knit social communities
• Credible exit: Users are always in control of both their identity and their data

We are building Noosphere for everyone, and we hope you will build it with us. To pitch in and help shape the project, join our community on Discord and/or get involved with our open source project on Github!

Technical design #

Noosphere is designed to be compatible with the hypertext web you know and love. URL-style hyperlinks still work. And, content on Noosphere may be delivered directly to web browsers that speak HTTP.

Noosphere also introduces a set of new technical concepts that may be unfamiliar to those who come from a traditional web development background. Refer to the technical design foundations section for a more detailed exploration of this topic.