Glossary

Terminology, personas, and protocol concepts used throughout the Gozzip documentation.

Personas

Named roles that participants can hold in the network. A single user may hold multiple persona roles simultaneously.

Protocol Terms

Storage pact — A bilateral agreement between two nodes to store each other's events. Reciprocal, volume-balanced within 30% tolerance. Formalized as kind 10053.

Bootstrap pact — A one-sided temporary pact triggered when a new user follows someone. The followed user stores the newcomer's data. Auto-expires after 90 days or 10 reciprocal pacts. No WoT required.

Guardian pact — A voluntary one-sided pact where an established user (Guardian) stores data for one untrusted newcomer (Seedling) outside their WoT. One slot per Guardian. Expires after 90 days or when the Seedling reaches Hybrid phase (5+ pacts). Kind 10053 with type: guardian tag.

Archival pact — A pact covering full history or a deep range, with lower challenge frequency (weekly). For power users and archivists.

Standby pact — A pact where the partner receives events but is not actively challenged. Promoted to active when an active partner fails, providing instant failover.

Active pact — A pact where the partner is regularly challenged and expected to serve data on request. Default: 20 per user.

Web of Trust (WoT) — The graph of follow relationships. WoT distance d(p,q) is the minimum follow-hops between two nodes. The protocol operates within a 2-hop boundary.

Checkpoint — A periodic reconciliation marker (kind 10051) containing per-device event heads, a Merkle root, and profile references. Defines the storage obligation boundary for light pact partners.

Pact-aware gossip routing — Gossip forwarding prioritized by social proximity: active pact partners first, then 1-hop WoT, then 2-hop WoT. Unknown pubkeys are never forwarded.

Blinded data request — A data request (kind 10057) using bp = H(target_pubkey || YYYY-MM-DD) instead of a raw pubkey. Prevents surveillance of who reads whom. Rotates daily.

Three-phase adoption — Client behavior adapts based on pact count: Bootstrap (0–5 pacts, relay-primary), Hybrid (5–15, mixed), Sovereign (15+, peer-primary).

Cascading read-cache — When a node fetches events, it holds a local copy and can serve subsequent gossip requests. Popular content naturally replicates across the follower base. Bounded by configurable cache size (default 100 MB).

Reliability score — A per-peer rolling score using exponential moving average (alpha = 0.95) over 30-day challenge-response results. Healthy >= 90%, degraded 70–90%, unreliable 50–70%, failed < 50%.

Delivery Tiers

Event retrieval follows a cascade of increasingly expensive paths:

Node Types