Coalescent Computer

A simple and unenclosable social computing platform designed to replace the architecture and use cases of the World Wide Web.

What is the Coalescent Computer?

The Coalescent Computer is a brand new computing environment designed to empower people to reclaim computers as tools for individual and collective liberation, with a focus on data soveriegnty, minimization of data/compute/energy/carbon footprints, and "network coalescence". It is intended to be a permacomputer, designed to scale computing down from the global level to the community level, and to allow for mutation and evolution within communities of practice.

In its current form, the Coalescent Computer exists as a research project that intends to deliver a conceptual specification for a machine instruction set, data encoding protocol, data querying language, and communication protocols for a computing environment built on the principle of "coalescence", meaning that any instance of the machine can effortlessly integrate its state with any other instance. This website documents that research project.

As part of this research effort there will also be concrete reference implementations of each component of the stack, resulting in a real, usable computing environment that can handle real, interesting use cases for real, living people. The hope is that the principles of coalescence can provide an environment for rapid development of the ecosystem to the point where it can replace increasingly more parts of the World Wide Web. And since the system is "protocol-first", the original reference implementation can easily be ported to other platforms or replaced with more optimized implementations as adoption rollout requires.

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Project Status

Last Updated 10/21/23

Active Development

CDB Initial Development

The Coalescent Database is now under early active development. The first goal is to build a baseline database that can store and query simple CODA objects that can be accessed via a REST API for faster iteration.

Cohost Baseline Implementation

The VM now executes programs and also supports extensible device development. As a proof of concept, the cohost CLI includes a 'Console' device that can send and receive data from the CPU.

Co Baseline Implementation

ROM assembly and symbol export is now functional, and the current focus is on making the content addressable code library more intuitive to work with.

All Components

COINS Baseline Implementation
CODA Draft Specification
Relay Protocol Design Phase
CTP Initial Research

Recent Blog Posts

Understanding Coalescence

@jakintosh | May 17, 2023

Strange Loop 2023 Presentation Submission

@jakintosh | May 1, 2023

NLNet NGI Core April '23 Open Call

@jakintosh | April 1, 2023

NLNet NGI Entrust February '23 Open Call

@jakintosh | February 1, 2023

Continuing the Personal Computing Revolution

@jakintosh | January 18, 2023
All posts >>

Recent Devlog Updates

August 14, 2023 August 10, 2023 August 9, 2023 July 9, 2023 July 7, 2023 July 5, 2023 July 3, 2023 July 2, 2023 July 1, 2023 June 30, 2023 All logs >>