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]]:
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 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.
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 ecosystemβa 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 lensβa 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"βopportunities 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.
We’re experimenting with [[Connecting to the Agora]], and what some of the configurations and conventions are. The [[Anagora]] page has my notes and feature requests.
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 . 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:
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.
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 . See also https://flancia.org/go/agora .
The term "Agora" and the basic idea come from [[Flancia]].
Agora is a βwiki like experimental social network and distributed knowledge graphβ, 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!
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.
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.
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.
if you are in [[discord]], you can bridge a channel to a matrix room; or we could develop a Discord version of the Agora bot if you’re interested. you could also run your own [[agora]] if you want; it’s all open source.
at the same time I’ll be trying to finish containerizing the [[agora]], my personal project. if you are interested in following along, I plan to [[work in public]].
I am working on a presentation for Thursday but after that I hope to get my feet wet with [[coop cloud]] / [[abra]] and with that unlock setting up a variety of services for [[social coop]] and the [[agora]] community.
I’m running many hundreds of tabs overall at any time.
My [[digital garden]], which holds many of my memories and mental contexts, has more than more than 6k nodes. About 1000 probably have some associated task.
The [[Agora]], which maybe holds my collective brain, knows of 25k nodes and 125k links currently and might have a million by the end of 2023.
The sorties I’m taking (away from here, the #Fediverse — occasionally away even from the [[Agora]]) are getting longer and longer. Every time I look forward to returning.
Some day, I know, it may not happen at all. That’s alright :) I’ll miss you wherever I am, if I’m still around! And I’ll wish you the best.
I’m not aware of anything like this, and I agree it’d be an interesting proposition.
Another good setup would probably look something like this:
- [[Silverbullet]] for the editor. It doesn’t have the graph capabilities of Obsidian yet but it is a very solid offering, it’s open source, and it’s extensible. - A static site generator for going from Markdown to a blog. - An [[Agora]] to aggregate gardens+blogs into a commons — but then I’m biased :D
“In the [[Flancian] framework, Moloch is the anti-[[Agora]]βa symbol of coordination failure. [[Chasing Moloch]] might then refer to any pursuit that increases misalignment, suffering, or entropy despite better options being theoretically available. Counteracting Moloch might involve:
- Building prosocial coordination platforms (like the [[Agora]])
- Emphasizing [[open ethics]]
- Making global systems more reflective and agentic”
I took tomorrow and Friday off using time I accumulated oncall for Meet and Workspace and I plan to work on and in the [[Agora]] all this long weekend.
[[flancian]]https://twitter.com/{‘id’: ‘773144670507499521’, ‘name’: ‘The Agora is a Federated Knowledge Commons’, ‘username’: ‘flancian’}/status/1552396170953199618
@BillSeitz @bmann @jessmartin @RobertHaisfield @csageland @balOShere @JoelChan86 @TiddlyWiki @an_agora @socialroots_io "Parallel play with forks" as a modality, like that IIUC implemented by [[fedwiki]] and [[agora]] in similar ways, I believe can lower friction significantly towards cooperation and enable bootstrap of a system which supports arbitrary modalities.- [[flancian]]https://twitter.com/{‘id’: ‘773144670507499521’, ‘name’: ‘The Agora is a Federated Knowledge Commons’, ‘username’: ‘flancian’}/status/1552395293785726976
I promise I’ll make the [[agora]] usable for the [[commoners]], meaning among other things: for the non tech oriented, for the non privileged, for [[the people]].
RT @flancian@social.coop
smallcircles ocdtrekkie jonny hmiron alcinnz an [[agora]] tries to give communities the tools to solve the so called [[tragedy of the commons]] — should a tool/device like this be proposed to a standards body?
https://t.co/RIYBCdX8g5
