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| Protocol Introduction |
The Tent Protocol
Tent is a protocol for decentralized social networking. It allows you to control your data, who has access to it, and what can be done with it.
Anyone can run a Tent server or write a Tent app. There are Tent hosts for users who do not want to manage a server.
API Overview
Tent is a social layer over HTTP using JSON.
Requests are authenticated with HMAC signatures, and apps use OAuth 2 to access content on behalf of users.
Users
Tent users are called entities and identified by a URI.
Example: John Smith's entity might be `https://johnsmith.me/.
A HEAD request to
https://johnsmith.me/ would respond with a Link header pointing to
a Tent profile (e.g. https://tent.johnsmith.me/profile)
Servers
Tent servers are the protocol core. They represent the users and maintain their data and relationships. Servers also handle these responsibilities:
- Persisting data
- Notifying other servers about new data
- Ensuring content is only pushed to recipients accepting associated licences
- Managing a list of servers (entities) it is following
- Managing a list of servers (entities) that are following it
- Authorizing apps to access data
- Notifying apps about new or modified data to which they have access
tentd is the current reference Tent server.
Apps
Users create and view content on apps. Apps must authenticate with the user's server before content can be posted or viewed.
For example:
- ian-hanson.me (Ian) posts a status update (post) from a micro blogging app authenticated with his server.
- The app publishes the post to his server.
- His server sends a notification to every server following him or mentioned in the post with permission to see the post.
- If anna-collins.me (Anna) is following Ian, her server will receive a notification from Ian’s server containing the post.
- If Anna has an app setup for consuming status updates, her server will send it a notification with Ian’s post.
- Anna can now read Ian’s post from the status app.
- If Anna decides to reply, her response will follow a path inverse to Ian’s post.
TentStatus is an open source Tent app for creating and viewing status posts.
Posts
Posts are at the core of Tent. They are sent to followers immediately after being created. Users set permissions on each post that determine which other users can access them. Other users can fetch public posts individually or over a date range. Posts each have a post type which describes its data. Tent posts can be used to describe anything, and developers can create new post types for different kinds of media, interactions, or applications. This documentation describes four basic post types: status, short messages of 140 characters or less, essay, longer form writing, photo, pictures, and album, a collection of photo posts.
Profiles
Every Tent entity's server has a profile JSON file describing it. They store information about the user, specifically static information that should always be accessible.
The most basic profile has a single object containing the Tent version, the entity name (e.g. johnsmith.me), an array of supported licences, and an array of servers containing canonical API roots.
A user may have multiple versions of the same info type in your profile.
Notifications
Tent notifications are used when a server needs to let another server or app know about new content updates. This includes new posts and profile changes. Notifications are JSON POST requests containing posts.