Merge)

Date: 2026-07-29 Status: Accepted

Context

Five adversarial reviews (complexity, protocol-design, game-theory, cryptography, deployment-reality) plus a 2026-07 four-perspective pass converged on one diagnosis: the protocol's core (bilateral storage pacts inside a Web of Trust, verified by challenges, narrated as community formation) is strong, but the periphery (gossip machinery, equilibrium math, media pacts, versioning strategy, moderation pipelines, monitoring suites, interplanetary compatibility) was ~60–70% of the specification for a small fraction of the value. A protocol at zero users does not need this much surface.

This ADR records the structural simplification. The hard constraint throughout: the community-evolution narrative is preserved and, where possible, strengthened — the five personas (Keeper/Witness/Guardian/Seedling/Herald), the Community Parallel, the Bootstrap→Hybrid→Sovereign arc, and the Inner Circle/Orbit/Horizon feed tiers are untouched or promoted.

Decision

Cut (deleted)

Interplanetary compatibility (design/interplanetary.md) — the document itself declared this premature.
Blocklist federation (kind 10070-as-blocklist) — NIP-51 mute lists suffice at this scale.
Legal/DPIA analysis embedded in the GDPR doc — belongs to counsel, not a protocol spec.

Event kinds removed

10059 (storage endpoint hints) — iroh handles addressing.
10066 (guardianship completion) — the graduation rite survives as prose; the event does not.
10067 (notification relay advertisement) and 20062 (wake-up hint) — discovery infra for a market of 1–2 relays.
10070-as-blocklist — 10070 is now unambiguously the iroh cross-key binding.

This also resolves two live kind collisions: 10065 is now solely Temporary Suspension (Media Manifest deferred), and 10070 is solely the iroh binding. The canonical registry lives in protocol/messages.md.

Deferred (moved to `docs/future/`, content frozen)

Media layer, protocol-versioning strategy, BitChat/BLE mesh, post-quantum roadmap, proof-of-storage alternatives survey, spam-resistance analysis, monitoring & diagnostics suite. The one adopted item from proof-of-storage (Merkle-proof challenges) moved into storage.md.

Merged

Moderation + moderation-framework + GDPR deletion mechanics → one design/moderation.md.
Incentive model + equilibrium-pact-formation + guardian-incentives → one design/incentives.md.
Surveillance-surface + relay-diversity + gossip-privacy → one design/privacy-model.md.
The three iroh docs → one architecture/iroh.md.
The two dated plans/ feed-model docs → archived under docs/future/history/; architecture/feed-model.md is the sole live telling.

Consistency fixes

The 2026-07 pass also resolved 34 documentation-integrity findings (kind-range drift, reliability-band contradictions, retrieval-tier renumbering, transport-documentation inconsistencies, orphaned docs, a karma economy left in the test plan) and 24 soundness findings; the mechanism changes are recorded in ADR 013–ADR 018.

Consequences

Positive:

Core reader-facing spec shrinks from ~121k words to ~55–60k; newcomer required reading drops from ~15 documents to ~6 (vision → glossary → system-overview → storage → messages → pact-state-machine).
Event kinds 20 → 16; pact states 7 → 4; retrieval tiers 5 → 3; overlapping lifecycle machines 3 → 2.
Every deferred idea survives under docs/future/ — nothing good is lost, only relocated.

Negative:

Contributors must learn the new layout; deferred docs may drift from the core over time (mitigated by the docs/future/ banner marking them as history).

Neutral:

The five adversarial reviews are retained verbatim as the record of why; this ADR is their adjudication — which recommendations were adopted, deferred, or declined.

Deferred (moved to docs/future/, content frozen)

Deferred (moved to `docs/future/`, content frozen)