Node

So we return to the original idea of the World Wide Web: every user, group, organization or project has his own website. We will call it node. Installation of a node is made as simple as possible — you install one package, run one script or deploy one container, and your node is up and running.

Node provides to the outer world two interfaces: Web UI and REST API.

Web UI

The Web UI is a simple non-interactive website that displays the public content of the node. For example, if the node is used as a blog, the Web UI will contain public part of the user’s profile, all public posts, public comments, photos in public albums, etc.

The first goal of the Web UI is to allow regular Internet users to browse the node’s content without a need to install any special software or registering anywhere. This also solves a chicken-and-egg problem of social networks — even if there are not so many users that have Moera software installed, you always have readers from the outside.

The second goal is to allow search engines to index the public content of the node. All possible (and fair) search engine optimizations should be utilized.

REST API

The REST API is the gateway to all features of the node. It allows authenticating, reading and posting public and private content, changing settings, getting notifications, and so on. The REST API must be open, standardized and well-documented, anybody must be able to use and implement it in any software.

Web clients and mobile clients use REST API for all operations. Automated operations, like backups, reposts from other social networks, data migration, specialized Moera search engines, etc. also use it. REST API is also used for internode communication - receiving notifications, fetching new posts for the newsfeed etc.

Node REST API may be implemented (fully or partially) by any existing website, making its content available for reading and commenting with Moera client, for reposting to other nodes in Moera network, for adding to the newsfeed etc. The site becomes part of the social network without the need to copy every post, to have comments in different places and to hire a separate person to maintain this. It is possible to distribute a Moera REST API implementation as a plugin for popular content management systems (WordPress, Joomla etc.), so any site using a CMS may be converted to Moera node in one click.

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You may think about this as a backward-compatible “upgrade” of the Web.

The regular web server implements HTTP protocol. A user connects to it with a web browser, and the server returns data in HTML format that the browser knows to display.

The Moera node implements Moera node protocol (REST API). A user connects to it with the Moera client (which is a web application running in a web browser or a desktop or mobile application), and the server returns social network data in a structured form that the client knows to display.

But, for backward compatibility, if a user connects with a Moera-capable browser to a site that does not provide Moera API, it will show the regular HTML interface. And another way around, if a user connects with a regular web browser to a Moera-capable site, it will show the fallback Web UI described above.