What keeps us awake at night is a simple mission: to give humans the systems they need to come together, build communities, and pursue shared goals without interference from third-party servers with different agendas. We’re not the first to dream of this, but we won’t stop until that world exists.
What drives us is the belief that tools shape societies. We were inspired by Douglas Engelbart, who demonstrated that technology could augment collective intelligence, and by Project Xanadu, which envisioned a deeply connected, expressive form of hypermedia. A better medium for thinking and communication will dramatically improve how we live and dream.
Every path leads to the same destination: an open web. An open network where any community can participate without permission, where systems can be bootstrapped from the edges, and where coordination does not depend on centralized control.
What we didn’t anticipate was how long it would take to develop the craftsmanship required to assemble these ideas into a coherent whole. Five years went into learning how to combine content-addressable storage, CRDTs, hypermedia primitives, peer-to-peer systems, gossip protocols, capability-based security, and a humane user experience. The product is the Hypermedia Network, an extremely decentralized network to upgrade the web with identity and a distributed linkbase of unbreakable links.
Along the way, several parallel efforts shaped our thinking and helped clarify what the Open Web could become. Some of these systems directly inform our work today; others inspired us by exploring adjacent paths.
IPFS and libp2p have been essential to us. They allowed us to focus on the information and knowledge layer rather than reinventing the networking layer from scratch. By providing robust, reusable primitives for peer discovery, transport, and content addressing, they enabled us focus on human intellect augmentation. That said, the engineering effort required to adopt them was significantly higher than we initially expected. What we value most about IPFS and libp2p is that they’ve become a neutral ground: a shared layer that enables different networks to interoperate.
Alongside these, other projects deeply influenced our understanding: Keybase, Automerge, UCANs, Bluesky, and Nostr. Each explored critical aspects of collaboration, identity, authorization, and communication. While we don’t depend on them directly, their ideas helped sharpen our perspective on what the Open Web requires—and what it must avoid.
Five years have passed. We’ve watched many projects stall, pivot, or disappear. We haven't given up, and we won't ever will. We are doing this because we believe we deserve systems that serve humans and not the other way around. We are doing this because the problem remains unresolved. We are doing this because we know it can be done. We are doing this because we don't care if it is hard. And we are doing this because we couldn’t find a better thing to do with our lives.