01 · Project Overview
The compact statement of what TalkCo is: warm messaging, contextual publishing, non-goals, and the layers underneath.
TalkCo application spec
TalkCo Application Spec
A reader-oriented map of the product, design, research, and architecture documents behind TalkCo.
Start Here
The shortest path through the project spine: what TalkCo is, why the design refuses common social-media mechanics, and what evidence supports that refusal.
02 · Philosophy & Design Principles
The core diagnosis: social media fuses influence, hierarchy, and identity into a public scoreboard, and TalkCo removes those inputs.
02b · Research Foundations
The empirical basis for the design: cumulative advantage, visible popularity signals, profilicity, and simulation as a validation tool.
Product Mechanics
Identity, channels, conversations, feeds, notifications, safety, and governance as concrete application behavior.
03 · Identity, Profiles & Contexts
How keys, contextual profile spheres, introductions, and visibility boundaries replace a single flattened main account.
04 · Channels & Content
How channel publishing works: nesting, following, visibility, ephemerality, and local tag routing without global discovery.
05 · Messaging & Conversations
How conversations stay first-class: negotiated settings, scarce presence, lightweight replies, priority, deletion, and consentful artifacts.
06 · Feeds, Discovery & Anti-Virality
The anti-virality core: no global feed, relational discovery, no boost primitive, author-private reactions, finite feeds, and declared ordering.
07 · Notifications & Attention
How interruption is governed by recipient choice, visible priority markers, modes, and transparent dampening rather than engagement pressure.
08 · Safety & Moderation
The layered safety model: silent blocking, inherited blocking, labelers, restorative/protective routing, and no person-level reputation.
09 · Community & Governance
The first community-scale layer: shared accounts, membership, facilitation, labelers, and anti-status governance constraints.
Architecture & Protocol
How product promises meet shared invariants, protocol obligations, client policy, replaceable adapters, and carriers.
Hosting & Roadmap
How hosting can work without an engagement engine, and which product, protocol, legal, and go-to-market decisions remain intentionally open.
11 · Hosting, Storage & Funding
The hosting and sustainability model: a friends-and-family storage mesh, redundancy, storage gifting, paid capacity, and Sybil tradeoffs.
12 · Open Questions & Roadmap
The live decision map: what is settled, what belongs to the application spec, and what moves to protocol, research, or go-to-market work.
Research & Options
Non-canonical methodology, protocol, tooling, and architecture candidates. These pages preserve alternatives and test plans while the application spec stays readable.
From Message to Published Thread: Content Lifecycle and Event Models
How a local message can become a consentful published object, with immutable identities, audience ceilings, and explicit revision boundaries.
Encryption Methods for Conversations, Posts, Replies, and Attachments
A comparison of Signal-lineage ratchets, MLS, object envelopes, HPKE, proxy re-encryption, threshold release, and post-quantum seams.
Trust, Key Discovery, and Alternatives to TOFU
Alternatives and supplements to TOFU: direct verification, cross-signing, key transparency, witnesses, recovery, and peer discovery.
Access Control and Moderation Under E2EE
Where cryptographic authority ends and policy begins: grants, capabilities, moderation evidence, revocation, and conditional release.
Making TalkCo More Distributed: Discovery, Replication, Storage, and Metadata
Distributed versus decentralized architecture, peer discovery, local-first persistence, custody, repair, storage patterns, and metadata limits.
Master Research Table: Candidate Stack, Seams, and Evidence
A qualified tooling map covering MLS, messaging, signed data, local-first databases, transports, content-addressed storage, and adapter seams.
Architecture Profiles and Decision Tests
Candidate architecture profiles and a falsification harness for deciding what belongs in the first implementable slice.
Distributed E2EE Publishing Research
A map of provisional methodologies for distributed end-to-end-encrypted publishing, messaging, discovery, access control, storage, and verification.
Matrix P2P and Tachyon: client authority without importing the whole stack
Participants need useful state and agency when a service disappears or a network partitions. Moving packets between peers solves only part of that problem. A system must also decide who may admit a device, disclose an...
Reference
Navigation, source literature, and shared terms.
TalkCo — Application Spec · Table of Contents
A complete section map for the application spec, useful when looking for a particular design area or open question.
References
Shared citation keys and source notes for research, identity theory, protocol, and infrastructure claims.
Glossary
Definitions for recurring TalkCo terms across identity, channels, feeds, safety, governance, and infrastructure.