Announcing the Willow Protocol(s)

Hey everyone,

@gwil and I are excited to finally broadcast a project we have been working on for the past ten months: Willow, a family of protocols for building peer-to-peer systems. Willow sits in a similar problem space as Scuttlebutt, but with some fundamental design choices that favor mutability and multi-writer support over the immutability and single-writer focus of ssb.

A whole lot of more precise info is on the website: https://willowprotocol.org/

We have a stable data model, an almost-stable, capability-based system for access control, and a replication protocol that gwil is currently in the process of implementing. Soon, all of these will power the next version of Earthstar.

This project is our exploration of various ideas that have originally germinated in the scuttleverse, particularly the rejection of global singletons and the focus on local communities have shaped the design quite a bit.

Anyways, we are proud of it, excited, and hope that others here might share our excitement!

https://willowprotocol.org/

#willow

CC @glyph , @Vim 'Derek' Simmonds, #earthstar

congrats @joshalja and @gwil, yay Willow! 💜 🌱

These are superbly well written specs, and you can see Gwil's and Aljoscha style combined, if you're familiar with their work.

Gonna try to understand how it works.

this is amazing!!! OMG!!!! Congratulations @Aljoscha and @gwil :D :D :D this looks neat af and is the cutest documentation I have ever seen. I love those illustrations soooo much.

Willow is the DWeb protocol I’m most excited about right now. I’m excited to see where you take this!