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.

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.

Rotating request token — A daily-rotating pseudonymous lookup key H(target_pubkey || YYYY-MM-DD) used in data requests (kind 10057). Prevents casual cross-day request linkage but is reversible by any party that knows the target's public key. Not a formal cryptographic blinding scheme.

Data availability verification — The challenge-response mechanism used to verify that pact partners can produce stored data on demand. 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 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