Why Moss?

The missing standard for social space

What we now call "The Web" was the result of three open standards: HTML, HTTP, and the URL. Anyone could publish a document and link to any other document. JavaScript and CSS made those documents functional and beautiful.

But none of those standards let groups create and manage their own social space. So that function got absorbed by large platforms. Facebook holds your group's page. GitHub holds your code. Google holds your shared docs.

Holochain is an open standard that lets small groups spin up their own functioning social spaces — scalable, decentralized, and without intermediaries. Moss builds on Holochain and adds the Weave Interaction Pattern — an open standard for creating, linking, searching, and organizing those spaces into richer social fabric.

What that means for you

• You own the software. Moss is open source (CAL-1.0). No license fees, no lock-in.
• Your group owns its network. Each group is its own private peer-to-peer network. Joining a group means connecting to its members, not to a service.
• Your group owns its data. The data lives on the devices of the people in the group. When everyone leaves, it's gone. There is no third party holding copies.
• Your tools compose. A group isn't stuck with whatever a single vendor decided to build. Tools from different developers can link to each other.

Who's behind Moss

Moss is developed by Lightningrod Labs and the broader Holochain community. It's a reference implementation of a Frame for The Weave — meaning it's one of possibly many runtimes that can speak the Weave Interaction Pattern.

For more technical depth, see the developer documentation.