Nomad (formerly Zot)

Nomad is the protocol with which Hubzilla is operated. It enables communication, identity management and access control.

Communication using Nomad can be public or private, with private communication providing not only fully encrypted transport but also encrypted storage for protection. Nomad supports a wide range of background services in the grid, from friend suggestions to directory services. New content and data updates are passed in the background between hubs across the grid according to the access control lists and permissions set by the sender and receiver channels. Data is also synchronised between any number of channel clones so that hub members can access data and continue to collaborate seamlessly even if their primary hub is unavailable or offline.

Nomad also provides a nomadic identity so that your communication with friends, family or other people you communicate with is not affected by the loss of your primary communication node - either temporarily or permanently.

The important parts of your identity and your relationships can be saved on a USB stick, laptop or PC and appear at any time on any node in the network - with all your friends and preferences.

Crucially, these nomadic instances are kept synchronised so that each instance can take over if another is compromised or corrupted. This not only protects you from major system failures, but also from temporary website overload and government manipulation or censorship.

Hubzilla's nomadic identity, single sign-on and decentralisation ensure a high degree of resilience and consistency in Internet communication. Using magic-auth, you only log in once to your home hub (or a nomadic backup hub). This allows you to access all authenticated services offered anywhere on the web - such as shopping, blogs, forums and access to private information. The password is not stored on a thousand different websites, but on servers that you control or trust.

Access control: Nomad's identity layer makes it possible to assign finely graded authorisations for each piece of content that you want to publish. These authorisations extend across the entire grid. It's like having a huge website made up of a large number of small, individual websites, where each channel in the grid can fully control its privacy and sharing preferences for all the web resources it creates.

Currently, Hubzilla supports access control for many types of data, including discussion posts and comments, photo albums, events, cloud files, websites, wikis and more. Each item and how and with whom it is shared is completely under your control.

In the grid, you don't need a huge user database on your computer, because the grid is the user database. It has an essentially infinite capacity (limited by the total number of hubs that are online on the Internet) and is distributed across countless computers.

Access can be granted or denied, anywhere in the grid, for any resource, channel or group of channels. Others can access your content if they are allowed to, and they don't even have to have an account on the same hub.

Hubzilla currently uses the Nomad protocol with program routines in version 6 (Zot6).