Gozzip
What It Is
Gozzip is the project I'm most excited about right now. It's an open, censorship-resistant protocol for decentralized social media and messaging. The core idea: your social graph itself is the infrastructure. Your friends store your data. Your relationships are the network.
No servers. No corporate middleman. No one to shut you down.
How It Works
The protocol implements bilateral storage pacts — agreements between trusted peers to store each other's data with cryptographic verification. Each user maintains around 20 active pacts plus 3 standby partners. The math works out to a probability of simultaneous offline failure of roughly 10^-9. That's more reliable than most cloud providers.
Two types of nodes:
- Keepers (full nodes) — store complete history, expect 95% uptime. About 25% of users naturally fill this role.
- Witnesses (light nodes) — maintain 30-day windows, expect 30% uptime. The majority of users.
Data retrieval cascades through four paths: local cache (92% success), cached endpoints (~80ms), Web of Trust gossip with blinded requests, and relay fallback. Most traffic stays within your social network.
The Design Philosophy
The design draws from Robin Dunbar's research on fractal social layers. The protocol primitives map to observable human relationship patterns: ~5 intimate contacts, ~15 close friends, ~50 good friends, ~150 casual friends.
Human communities survive through reciprocity and reputation built on observed behavior. Gozzip formalizes these as volume-matched pacts, private per-peer scoring, and guardian sponsorship for newcomers.
Portable Identity
Your data is self-authenticating and portable across Nostr, ActivityPub (Mastodon), AT Protocol (Bluesky), and RSS/Atom feeds. One identity, many networks. The way it should have been from the start.
The Incentive Model
Here's what I love about this: the incentive model is aligned. You store my data because I store yours. The more reliable you are, the more reliable peers you attract. There's no company extracting value from the middle. No engagement algorithm deciding what you see. Your social graph is sovereign.
Traditional social networks have a fundamental incentive misalignment: the platform profits from your attention, not your wellbeing. Gozzip eliminates the platform entirely.
Technical Stack
- secp256k1 keypairs (Nostr-compatible)
- Noise Protocol handshakes
- NIP-59 gift-wrapped encryption
- Hierarchical key derivation with purpose-specific keys
- BLE mesh, IP-based gossip routing
- Seven new Nostr event kinds that function as valid Nostr events without relay modification