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.

"Inner Circle" (capitalized) refers specifically to feed tier 1 (see below). A Keeper is a full-node pact partner; the two often overlap but are not the same set.

Protocol Terms

Storage pact — A bilateral agreement between two nodes to store each other's events. Reciprocal but capped-asymmetric: each partner stores whatever the other produces, up to ~10 MB/month per partner (no volume matching — see ADR 013). Formalized as kind 10053. A healthy pact renews by default at 90 days (ADR 015).

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) — the newcomer has grown roots. Kind 10053 with type: guardian tag.

Active pact — A pact regularly challenged and expected to serve data on request. Target: ~20 active per user, floor 12 (ADR 016). (Standby and archival pacts are deferred post-v1 — see docs/future.)

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.

Inner Circle — Feed tier 1. Mutual follows whose content is continuously synced via storage pacts. Always available, 30-day cache (pact window).

Orbit — Feed tier 2. Authors the user interacts with heavily, plus authors socially endorsed by 3+ Inner Circle contacts. Polled periodically, 14-day cache TTL.

Horizon — Feed tier 3. 2-hop graph reach weighted by edge count, plus relay-curated discoveries. On-demand fetching, 3-day cache TTL.

Interaction score — A per-author rolling score computed from public interactions (replies weight 3, reposts weight 2, reactions weight 1) with exponential recency decay (half-life ~21 days). Used for feed ranking and referral signals.

Referral threshold — The point at which an author enters a user's Orbit: 3+ Inner Circle contacts with interaction scores above the minimum (default: 5 weighted interactions in 30 days).

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. (Gossip is an optional censorship-resistance extension in v1, not a required retrieval tier — see ADR 017.)

Data request — A NIP-44-encrypted direct request (kind 10057) to a chosen storage peer, addressed over iroh. Reader privacy relative to Nostr comes from where metadata flows (WoT peers, not arbitrary relays), not from requester anonymity (ADR 017).

Data availability verification — The challenge-response mechanism used to verify that pact partners can produce stored data on demand (kind 10054). Proves accessibility within the response window, not persistent local storage.

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, presence-aware score: partners are challenged only while observed online, and the score is passes ÷ challenges-issued-while-online over a rolling 14-day window (ADR 014). Bands: Healthy ≥90%, Degraded 70–90%, Unreliable 50–70%, Failed <50%. A partner is dropped only when Failed is sustained ≥14 days. Presence-awareness is what lets a 30%-uptime Witness score as Healthy instead of as a defector.

DVM — Data Vending Machine (NIP-90): a request/response service pattern on Nostr, used here for relay-mediated storage-peer lookups as a fallback.

Retrieval Tiers

Reading an event follows a three-tier cascade (ADR 017):

Gossip (WoT-filtered forwarding) and BLE mesh are optional/deferred extensions, not required tiers.

Node Types