hearsay

What it is

A LoRa radio in your window, holding what it has heard. When another one comes into range they compare notes and hand over what the other lacks. Nothing is routed and nobody forwards anything on your behalf: a post reaches you because a person moved.

So a post from three towns over arrives because somebody carried it, and you can see who. It runs on loraline, the same radio underneath catacomms and longshore.

Your audience is geography

You cannot build a following. There is no algorithm, no recommendation, and no reach beyond what the radios do. A post spreads because the people who already have it walk about, and it stops when they stop.

Which means there is nothing to optimise and no way to go viral past the horizon. The only thing that ever happened to a post is that somebody carried it, and that is already written on it.

Pages

A post is a sentence and a page is a document, and they travel the same way: signed once, held by whoever has heard it, handed on to whoever comes near.

The arithmetic settles the format. Two kilobytes of text is twenty frames, six seconds on air and ten minutes of owed silence, so a node can put out about six an hour; an ordinary web page of two hundred kilobytes is seventeen hours. Text, then, four kilobytes at most, and a meeting hands over one page rather than six.

Six kinds of line: a heading, a smaller heading, a quotation, a thing in a list, a link, and a paragraph. Nothing is HTML and no document can point off the radio. A carried page that could name a picture on the internet would have your browser quietly fetch it, and then this is not a network that stands on its own, it is a slower way of using the old one.

So the node turns pages into markup itself, and an ordinary browser never sees anything the node did not write. A link is either a page on this radio or it is a page name, whatever it looks like: => https://example.com/x becomes a page nobody has written.

Nobody types an address. A link reads as hank/tides while pointing at the address underneath, an address on its own is somebody's front page, and /pages lists everything held with faces beside it.

What can be proved

A post is signed once by whoever wrote it and the signature travels with it for ever. The address it is signed under is the hash of both halves of that person's keys, so nobody can attach an invented signing key to a real name.

• A carrier cannot change a word of a post.
• A carrier cannot write one in somebody else's name.
• A carrier can drop it, refuse to pass it on, or lie about where they got it.

So the trail of who carried it is a claim rather than a proof. Signing every hop would make it provable and cost eighty-eight characters each time, against a budget of about forty posts an hour. Not a trade worth making.

The name is that caveat. Hearsay is what you have when the account is sound and the chain of telling is not.

Who wrote it

Your face and your name are loraline's, set once and the same everywhere. What hearsay adds is a signature around them.

Everywhere else on this radio the person reading you is somebody you can hear. Here they are three hops away and have never met you, so your name and picture travel signed, and a stranger can check them against your address.

A name is not verified and cannot be. Anybody can sign a profile calling themselves anything, and the signature proves only which key wrote it. Close up that hardly matters, because the people in range mostly know you. At three hops it matters a great deal, which is why the address is always on screen beside the label somebody chose for it.

What an evening is like

Slow, and small. Five people in a town write something like twenty posts across an evening, which is about five an hour between them.

What you are reading is complete up to roughly half an hour ago. The recent end is partial and filling in, as posts arrive with whoever walked past. The lag is not a problem to solve: it is what makes this feel like a place you are in rather than a list you scroll.

A post is 140 characters. Under the European duty cycle a radio may speak for thirty-six seconds an hour, which works out at about forty posts, and nobody has ever come close. The radio is not what limits this. People are.

It stays running

A node that only runs while you are looking at it carries nothing. The whole mechanism is holding posts between meetings and handing them on when somebody passes, so it belongs on something that stays on: a small computer with the radio in a window, serving a page to your house. You read it from a phone when you feel like it.

What it is carrying is kept on disk and picked up again when it starts, so a reboot does not empty anybody's pockets.

What it can't do

Reach past the radio

There is no bridge to the internet and there is not going to be one. The property this has is that the audience is geographic, and a web mirror would dissolve that quietly because it would be so useful.

Keep anything for long

A node holds two hundred posts and forgets the oldest. It is a pocket, not an archive. A post can die: if everybody holding it forgets before it reaches the next person, it is gone.

Hide anything from the people in range

Anybody within earshot with the passphrase can read and log everything. Posts travel and persist in other people's pockets. This is a village noticeboard, not a private channel.

Prove who you are

Signatures prove which key wrote a post. Nothing proves the person behind the key is who the name says.

Getting it

hearsay is inside the loraline app. It is the panel that keeps working while you are looking at something else, because it can only pass things on when somebody walks past, and that does not happen while it is shut.

It wants to stay on, which is why closing the window does not quit.