Thursday, October 8, 2026
Replicated Commons Protocol
RCP/1 is a public-domain protocol for peer-to-peer cultural archives that survive without a server. Five rules keep forks interoperable. Everything else is yours to change. Draft specification, no reference implementation.
Ten things
- RCP/1 is a public-domain protocol for peer-to-peer cultural archives that survive without a server. Five rules keep forks interoperable. Everything else is yours to change. Draft specification, no reference implementation.
- A bundle's id is the hash of its own manifest, with the id field itself omitted and the remaining keys serialised canonically — sorted, UTF-8, no insignificant whitespace.
- Everything a real archive needs beyond that — cataloguing, search, moderation, curation, design, community rules — is intentionally left undefined, because those are the parts every community must be free to answer differently.
- Because a bundle is an ordinary directory of ordinary files, it can be copied by any tool that has ever copied files — cp , rsync , a sync client, a torrent, a file manager, a phone plugged into a laptop.
- This means any edit — adding a work, fixing an attribution, removing material a community has asked to withdraw — produces a different bundle with a different identity.
- A protocol you must ask permission to fork has a single point of failure in exactly the place this design is trying to eliminate — and a commons that one party can close is not a commons, whatever its licence says.
- Placing this specification in the public domain says nothing about the licensing of anything anyone stores in a bundle, and implementations must not treat it as though it does.
- A phone, a community node, a USB drive, or a local Wi-Fi link holds a bundle now and passes it onward whenever contact next becomes possible — in an hour or in a year.
- Not because a name is owned, but because the name is only useful while it still predicts whether two strangers can exchange a bundle.
- Through a lapsed domain, an unpaid invoice, a hard drive in a closet, an institution reorganising, a platform deciding the category is unprofitable.
Five questions
Which term completes this sourced statement? “RCP/1 is a public-domain protocol for peer-to-peer cultural archives that survive without a server. Five rules keep forks interoperable. _____ else is yours to change. Draft specification, no reference implementation.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Everything a real archive needs beyond that — cataloguing, search, moderation, curation, design, community rules — is _____ left undefined, because those are the parts every community must be free to answer differently.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “This means any edit — adding a work, fixing an _____, removing material a community has asked to withdraw — produces a different bundle with a different identity.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “_____ this specification in the public domain says nothing about the licensing of anything anyone stores in a bundle, and implementations must not treat it as though it does.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Not because a name is owned, but because the name is only useful while it still predicts whether two _____ can exchange a bundle.”