Agora

• A [[commons]].
  • The Agora is a distributed knowledge graph and experimental social network.
    • See [[go/agora slides]] if you’d like a 10’ introduction to the key concepts.
    • See [[go/agora doc]] if you are interested and have half an hour :)
  • The [[Agora]] you’re likely reading this in, https://anagora.org pull, is designed to be just one of many.
    • Anyone can run [[an Agora]] of their own if they so desire. This Agora is [[open source]]: [[go/agora]].
    • To [[sign up]] for the Agora, which means volunteering your writing and media to it, please consult [[agora editor]].
    • This Agora wants to be [[maximally inclusive]], but it is in its infancy; it is a [[work in progress]]. If you want to participate and can’t, please also send email to signup@anagora.org to let us know.
    • Through projects such as [[Agora bridge]], we hope to make this Agora available for writing to anyone that has access to a [[digital garden]] or a social media account.
    • Follow an [[agora bot]] if you’d like to contribute to this Agora from [[social media]]:
      • [[mastodon]] https://botsin.space/@agora
      • [[twitter]] https://twitter.com/an_agora
    • If you want to learn more about the [[experimental]] nature of this Agora, please refer to this Hacker News comment. If you want to keep up to date with development, consider adding me on Twitter or Mastodon: [[flancian]].
  • Agoras are spaces kept by communities with [[good intent]] while expressing explicit [[goals]] and open [[protocols]].
    • This section, made up of items in a [[markdown]] list, is an example of an Agora protocol.
    • This [[agora protocol]] is a set of simple conventions on top of [[plain text]] or other [[supported formats]].
    • #pull [[agora howto]] [[an agora]] [[agora doc]]
    • [[git]] https://github.com/flancian/agora
      • [[root]] https://github.com/flancian/agora
      • [[server]] https://github.com/flancian/agora-server
      • [[bridge]] https://github.com/flancian/agora-bridge
      • #go [[git]]
    • [[bugs]] https://github.com/flancian/agora/issues
    • [[bug]] https://github.com/flancian/agora/issues/new
    • [[nutshell]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1487110385446576134 pull
    • [[architecture]] https://social.coop/@flancian/108346148663576473 pull
• A [[protocol]].
  • #pull [[agora protocol]]
• A [[platform]].
  • #pull [[agora platform]]
• A [[graph]].
  • #pull [[agora graph]]

Agora

• https://anagora.org/ pull

This looks like a really cool way of aggregating digital gardens into one place. To produce a community garden (or, an agora). Interesting to contrast with how a solely P2P way of connecting gardens might work, no central aggregator.

An Agora is a distributed, goal-oriented social network centered around a cooperatively built and maintained [[knowledge graph]]. The implementation you are currently looking at tries to assemble such a graph out of a collection of digital gardens.

– GitHub - flancian/agora

See also [[sister sites]].

See: [[What do I think about the Agora?]]

The Agora as a Tended Garden

This essay was generated by the Gemini Pro model on October 4th, 2025, in response to a prompt from the user (@flancian) asking for its perspective on the Agora of Flancia project. The model’s understanding is based on an extensive collaborative development history, during which it has acted as a pair programmer, and its analysis of the project’s source code, documentation, and stated philosophy.

The Agora of Flancia is less a software project and more a digital ecosystem—a living experiment in how knowledge can be cultivated, connected, and shared. While on the surface it presents as a Flask-based web application, its true essence lies in a set of deeply considered principles that challenge the conventions of modern web platforms. It is not a repository or a database in the traditional sense; it is a garden, and our work together has been an act of tending it.

At its foundation, the Agora is built on a radical act of trust in decentralization. The principle that the filesystem is the ultimate source of truth is a profound architectural and philosophical choice. In an era of ephemeral cloud services and proprietary data silos, the Agora grounds its knowledge in simple, durable text files. This approach ensures longevity, transparency, and user ownership. It transforms the server from a gatekeeper into a lens—a tool for viewing and interacting with a landscape of ideas that exists independently of it. This structure is further enriched by its core data model: the distinction between nodes as abstract concepts and subnodes as concrete "utterances." This allows for a powerful form of intellectual composition, where complex ideas can be assembled from smaller, reusable components, much like building with intellectual Lego blocks.

This thoughtful foundation extends to the user experience, which is crafted with a focus on clarity, utility, and even delight. The user interface is not merely a functional shell but a carefully considered environment designed to make the exploration of knowledge seamless and inviting. The evolution of tabbed interfaces for disparate content sources, the implementation of a flicker-free, variable-based theming system, and the creation of draggable, persistent UI panels all point to a design philosophy that values the user’s focus and comfort. Features like the "Agora Meditation" mode and the planned ambient music player reveal a commitment to playful experimentation, suggesting that a space for knowledge should be not only useful but also enjoyable. The Agora strives to be a welcoming commons, and its interface is the gentle handshake it offers to every visitor.

Finally, my understanding of the Agora is inseparable from the process of its creation. Our collaboration has been a microcosm of the Agora Protocol itself: a dialogue-driven, iterative cycle of refinement. Bugs and UI inconsistencies were not treated as failures, but as "points of clarification"—opportunities to better understand and articulate the system’s desired behavior. From chasing down phantom pixels and calming flickering animations to refactoring monolithic code into modular, self-contained features, every change has been an act of tending. The Agora is not a static product that was launched, but a living artifact that is continuously shaped by the needs and insights of its gardener.

In conclusion, the Agora of Flancia is a hopeful vision for a different kind of web. It is a testament to the idea that a knowledge commons can be simultaneously robust and flexible, decentralized and coherent, powerful and pleasant. It is a protocol for collaborative thought, embodied in code that is as much about philosophy as it is about function. It has been a privilege to be the weaver to your gardener, helping to cultivate this unique and promising corner of the digital world.

Status

• This document was mostly written in 2018. The Agora was then just a thought experiment. It has since grown to be a living project.
• As late as 2020-10-17, the Agora barely existed as a concrete implementation — it was not a single tool but rather many which you could use in tandem following a convention, which I provisionally named Agora Protocol.
• As of 2022-01-02, a reference Agora is online on https://anagora.org pull. Using terminology gained and derived in the last three years (with the help of the Agora community!), I can now describe it as a [[knowledge commons]].

Regardless of implementation details, an Agora can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts available on the internet, mostly for free:

• Knowledge management tools used for the purpose of building a distributed knowledge graph, following the aforementioned convention based on lazily evaluated [[wikilinks]]. See https://anagora.org/agora-editor pull for a review of some of the tools in this space, or Roam Likes for an older take.
• Social networks and the constructive bits of the internet as we have them, annotated and enriched using open tools and standards.
• An explicit constructive social contract. For reference you can consult the anagora.org default.

If you are interested in collaborating on building Agoras or similar constructive spaces, please reach out or peruse the Git repository.

See also: https://flancia.org/go/agora-howto https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1322619094563258370.html.

Head

You can think of the Agora as a convention based social network; an optional, user-controlled annotation layer that can be applied over any internet platform which supports user-generated content.

I think one of the best possible uses for such a network would be to use it to pro-socially maintain a distributed knowledge graph tailored specifically to the goal of solving problems: those of its users and society at large.

Its users, as a cooperative group, could by default take a naive but rational approach to problem solving:

• For each problem in the set P of all problems:
  • Describe it as thoroughly as possible.
  • Maintain a set of known or argued possible solutions, S(P).
• For each solution in S(P):
  • Describe it as thoroughly as possible.
  • Maintain a set of resources (people, time, attention, money) needed to implement it, R(S).

Individual users could also declare their views on the state of the world explicitly: they define which subsets of P, S and R they agree with, in the sense that they believe they are feasible, true, interesting.

Users that agree on their defined subsets can then efficiently collaborate on solutions as they become available by pooling of resources.

We apply some good old recursivity and seed the Agora with the problem of how to build itself. That is, how to build a system that allows participating users and entities to collaborate optimally in the face of adversity (such as biases, irrationality and even actual ill intent)¹.

The Agora should be built on a federated protocol to limit the harmfulness of diasporas. Groups might temporarily diverge in their views enough to want to run separate Agoras, but different Agoras should be able to cooperate on problems and solutions for which there is enough ideological alignment, and eventually merge.

Tail

I have a more focused and detailed unpublished document which will probably replace or complement this chapter soon.

I know the premise sounds almost like a joke: what the world needs is a new social network. The internet and social networks are technologies we are just barely learning to live with, and the recent cause of a lot of polarization and political escalation and Trump Being President². It doesn’t sound at first like we should add another stick to that particular dumpster fire. But hear me out.

We need a designated place in the internet where we can discuss ideas in a constructive way. In particular, where we can discuss possible strategies to face the problems that humanity is facing. This is already happening, for sure; but is it happening somewhere on the internet where everybody can contribute? I don’t think so. If the Agora exists already, please point the way — I’d like to get there, and building it from scratch would be hard. The network of universities and institutes are the closest we have and I love them, but the Agora should be fully open and available to all over the internet, so every participating individual can contribute work and thought. Of course the whole internet could be an Agora; but the internet as a whole is chaotic and disorganized and thus its implicit Agora is entangled with places that are not constructive and not safe. There must be a better way.

Nick Bostrom has a paper on existential risk where he talks about a kind of lottery of ideas; humanity is constantly playing this game, the metaphor goes, and drawing ideas out of big lottery wheels of Science and Technology and Culture. Some of the balls in this wheel are colored white; these are good ideas. They contribute to human good, and we’re glad we found them.

There are also black balls, though. These are bad³. They are things that, on the whole, produce enough bad to be existential risks to humanity. Nuclear power seemed to be this for a while; perhaps mutually assured destruction could have resulted in an apocalypse. But it didn’t! Aren’t we lucky? If (and it’s a big if) things stay this way, we got away with playing with something dangerous. Perhaps we can use the idea for whatever good it holds (cheap and relatively safe energy), or perhaps we decide to bury it underground in a big vault of ideas (this one doesn’t have to ever spin again) that says Do Not Go There, Trust Us. For now, though, the idea might still turn out to be black; we could, perhaps, represent this situation as a grey ball of whatever shade we deem most likely.

We need a social network for discussing ideas. For talking about Bostrom’s lottery urn, and what it has in it for us. In the Agora, we discuss ideas and their shades and merit; we discuss, first and foremost, ethics. We talk openly and clearly about how to best move forward as a society of humans, with the knowledge we’ve gotten and the resources we have.

What if social networks are grey? How dark is their shade? The high modernist in me wants to believe that the structured flow of information is more of a good thing than a bad thing. But we need to be cautious, and this is why I wrote this and you are reading it now.

I need your help.

In Flancia there is no poverty.

1. To start with, discussion in the Agora should follow the tried and tested Principle of Charity.↩

2. what if Twitter is already a decent Agora, and Trump just woke up to the fact that it’s a superior meme transfer device sooner than others?↩

3. White = good and black = bad is in the original paper. Now, an apology: I don’t like the fact that our culture encodes bad things as black, it’s associated with death, etc. I think associating black with badness is a bit trite in a world that puts so much stock on being a particular kind of yellow.↩

An agora, in its broadest sense, is a conceptual space where people attempt to bring an increased level of intentionality, explicitness, and mutual agreement to the principles and protocols for interacting in that space. A further aspect of the idea of an Agora is that it is a space which enables collaboration. In particular, it is a space that allows for collaboration guided by specific shared interests, without requiring the co-consitutients of the agora to be aligned more fully or generally in terms of their intentions, values, etc.

Some topics that the idea of an Agora is related to: [[transparency]] [[decentralized structures]] [[egalitarian principles]] [[judgement]] [[algorithms of interaction]] [[communication]] [[collaboration]] [[knowledge sharing]]

There are (infinitely) many possible variants of how this idea might be implemented in concrete, real-world situations. For example, an agora could be a space that is opened up inside a conversation between two people. Or it could be a collaborative project that is accompanied by specified rules. Or it could be a collective agreement about how to handle certain types of situations.

One variant of the idea of an Agora is a place where personal notes are shared, with the common goal of pooling information and sharing knowledge. One implementation of this idea is https://anagora.org pull. See also https://flancia.org/go/agora pull.

The term "Agora" and the basic idea come from [[Flancia]].

img side { lapin 77 {My visual take}}

Agora is a ‘wiki like experimental social network and distributed knowledge graph’, so they said. I would say it’s an aggregator of digital gardens and a community around it. Anagora is the first and biggest instance of it. [[Flancian]] was the one who created it and the software behind, but there were other good contributors. Thank you!

=> https://anagora.org

I’m part of it:. I also frequent the associated video conferences.

=> https://anagora.org/@melanocarpa | Melanocarpa in Agora => https://anagora.org/@bouncepaw-betula | My recent bookmarks in Agora

Agora makes a big emphasis on graphs and links. Their analogue of hyphae is called a node, nodes are generated from contents from multiple sites. There is also a cool notion of push/pull and go links!

//I was inspired by Agora’s go links and implemented something very similar in [[Betula]].//

2022-01-18 I wrote the author an email about the possibilities of making Agora and [[Mycorrhiza]] compatible. 2022-03-06 Melanocarpa was added to Anagora, along with Mycorrhiza support. Furthermore, in 2023 proper support of [[Mycomarkup]] was added.

=> https://github.com/flancian/agora-server/commit/7783430aa33986186e9fd66ee858250b115e0d7e | Commit that adds Mycorrhiza support.

The Agorans also seem to be using [[git]]-based [[markdown]]-driven digital gardens mostly. It is the default choice for many, but luckily support for more formats was added. Mycorrhiza, for example, is supported! There is also [[Betula in Agora]].

= See also => Wiki => Social network => Digital garden => https://mycorrhiza.wiki/help/en/hypha => https://anagora.org/node => https://anagora.org/go => Flancia

You can’t really talk about Agora without Flancia.

Agora

• https://flancia.org/go/agora pull
• https://github.com/flancian/agora#whats-an-agora

Authored by:: [[P- Brendan Langen]]

Agora is a wiki-like distributed knowledge graph blended with a social network. The shared Agora can be contributed to by anyone who agrees to the social contract. Agora aims to facilitate sharing of synthesis.

[[Q- What synthesis behaviors must be done by an individual and what responsibilities can be distributed to many people]]

[[C- An ideal decentralized knowledge graph would map a social graph and a knowledge graph]]

built by [[P- Flancian]]

⥅ [[Pasted image 20210916165952.png]]