Introducing the Blygger Protocol

A mild embarrassment (secret shame?) for us here at the Protocol Institute is that even though we’ve been studying, thought-leadering, and evangelizing protocols for 4 years now, we’ve never actually built and shipped a protocol of our own. Until now.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the first public release of our first-ever protocol, along with early releases of an entire arsenal of clients, adapters, and tools built by a small and growing community of writer-developers — Blygger.

Blygger is an AI-native decentralized social publishing protocol that neatly synthesizes key features of blogs, microblogs, wikis, Roam/Obsidian/Notion style notebooks, and versioned content systems. Blygger combines two established web standards, RSS and Webmentions, in a novel way to create a full-blown conversation medium. Blygger assumes, encourages, and enables use of AI at all levels from authoring to feed management.

Blygger is fully open-source, and you host your blyg on your own domain (which anchors your identity), and read/write through it, using a client that speaks blygger. This is currently the only way to have a blyg, though some community members are scheming out ways to offer third-party hosted blygs.

There is already a small, active community of ~30 users who have collectively posted thousands of blyg posts.

This is a developer launch, but in these brave new vibe-coding days, that means anyone comfortable with a coding agent.

But you don’t have to wait. You can explore the spec (with your LLM explaining as you explore), try out existing clients and tools, and get blygging and coding right away. Here’s a set of links where you can start exploring:

• Blygger.org where you can find the official protocol spec, getting-started material, links to repos of all known active projects (~10-12) building against it, and a directory of current contributors (~8-10). Point your agent here if you want to set up a blyg, and ask it to explain the options to you. The easiest way to get started is probably with the reference client, which will require a free-tier Cloudflare account.

• Blygger.com where you can find a directory of known blygs (30+ at this stage).

• The #intelligence-media channel on the Protocol-Institute Discord (invite link) where we discuss all things blygger and more.

• An early talk and demo from September when the protocol was first unveiled (it has advanced far beyond what you see in this video though.

• The hackathon registration link.

I recommend exploring a few active blygs from the directory to get a sense of what it’s like. It should look reassuringly familiar, and that’s by design. Here’s a gallery.

Though blygger is technically quite radical under the hood, we’ve done our best to keep the UX as familiar as possible, and the DX (that’s “Developer Experience” or perhaps we should call it VX for Vibecoder Experience) as unconstrained as possible. You can easily build from scratch against the spec, or modify an existing client or adapt another content management system to speak blygger. There are already adapters available for Hugo, Obsidian, and even venerable old Wordpress.

In principle, you can even just use blygger like a traditional blog, wiki, or notebook, though that would be no fun. You can even read blygs with a standard RSS reader since blygger feeds are RSS-compliant (though the experience will be kinda noisy since the protocol is necessarily much chattier and relies on clients to do intelligent filtering and roll-ups).

But for the full experience you need a blygger client, and you need to participate by posting, not just reading. As you’ll find out, the protocol affordances make blygger much more social than blogs or wikis ever were. The protocol strongly encourages a highly conversational mode of usage, via a basic response action called a “stub” which can behave like a reply, comment, quote, or general response. But you can also be off in your own corner writing essays or even entire versioned books if you like.

The blygger idiom does take a little getting used to, since it is so flexible, but your existing social media intuitions should get you 80% of the way there. If you can’t figure out why things are the way they are, your favorite LLM pointed at blygger.org should be able to explain matters. Or just ask us on Discord.

The Name

The word blygger is simultaneously the name of the protocol, the term for someone who publishes a blyg, and the protocol language (as in, clients speak blygger with each other). The y is pronounced like i in pig, not like the y in spy.

Blyg is a Swedish word meaning shy. Like little critters that run and hide in the thicket if you come across them while on a walk. Which is one of the reasons the network of blygs is called the blygger thicket.

The thicket (a word coined in this sense by PI researcher ) is an emerging zone of the web that is not quite as open as the social media of the 2010s used to be, and not quite as closed as the Cozyweb of messengers, slacks, and Discords today. It is a space of intermediate opacity, and blygger is the first of what we hope will be many protocols that allow humans and AIs to inhabit the thicket.

The thicket is neither a dangerous dark forest, nor is it an entirely safe space where you can walk around wearing a kick-me sign on your back. It is a space that takes some intelligence and a figurative machete to navigate, so it takes intelligence media to inhabit — media that allow live intelligence to flow from context to context.

Blygger is an early example of an intelligence medium. At the Protocol Institute, the thicket and intelligence media are key research themes within our broader New Nature vision.

We are very excited about what’s possible with Blygger, and you can see some glimpses of the emerging possibilities by exploring the various RFCs and Technical Notes (TNs) scoping out features under active development.