About Ringspace
Problem Statement
Ringspace is an attempt to revive the old concept of webrings, but with an added twist: mutual verification of identity and reputation. Historically, webrings were simply a “doubly-linked list” of sites, in which each member provided links to the previous and next members in the ring. A simple concept, brilliantly effective in its time to organize the web into discrete, discoverable communities in a time before search engines.
Today, we face a different challenge. The advent of generative AI and the transformation of the web into a slurry of misinformation and advertising have created a need for a new kind of web—a human web, in which there are different guarantees between the visitor, the creator, and peer creators in the community.
Ringspace takes the concept of a webring—a small community of creators of like mind connecting their sites—and adds to it a trust layer providing two assurances:
- Identity: “Are you who you claim to be?”
- Reputation: “Are you known to act in good faith?”
Ringspace achieves this through a hybrid model of decentralized site “manifests” and a central coordination server that performs validation, updates member sites on changes in the ring, and also handles trust and safety concerns for the ring.
This repository provides everything necessary to get started with the Ringspace “protocol,” including the manifest specification, server API specification, and reference implementation.
Name
The name “Ringspace” comes from a location in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novels. No spoilers here.
Credits
Ringspace was created by Michael Taggart of The Taggart Institute.
License
The Ringspace Protocol, Server, CLI tool, and browser extension are free and open source works licensed under the GNU AGPL v3.0.