Zot, Nomad, and Nomadic Identity in the Fediverse

A Pioneer of the Fediverse

Zot and Nomad pioneered many features, such as nomadic identity, portable identity, access control, identity proofs, among other things. It also pioneered federated single sign on, which was spun off into its own protocol, OpenWebAuth (OWA).

See the Technical Documentation for more details.

Brief History and Name Change

The Zot Protocol is one of the founding protocols of the fediverse, predating Mastodon, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol. It was created over a decade ago by Mike Macgirvin and is still maintained today. Later versions of the protocol were renamed as Nomad Protocol and are not backwards compatible with earlier versions.

Since the latest versions are not currently backwards compatible, to avoid confusion, we will refer to the incompatible versions as Zot and Nomad, respectively.

Implementations

The Zot Protocol is primarily used by Hubzilla and Streams. The Nomad Protocol is used between Streams servers.

Hubzilla uses Zot Protocol (Zot6) to communicate with other Hubzilla servers, and Streams uses Zot6 to communicate with Hubzilla. Streams uses the latest version of Nomad to talk to other Streams servers.

Since both Hubzilla and Streams are multi-protocol platforms, they use other protocols, such as ActivityPub & Diaspora, to communicate with other platforms.

Why does Zot and Nomad Still Exist?

One of the main reasons for maintaining Zot and Nomad, despite ActivityPub being more popular, is that ActivityPub lacks some of the key defining features, such as nomadic identity and access control.

Two different implementations are maintained. Zot6 is widely considered to be the stable production version, while later versions of Nomad are considered to be cutting edge and experimental. (Opinions may vary.)

Maintaining a separate protocol also allows for rapid development of new features without the need to get consensus first. We can implement new technology and provide working examples quickly, which gives other platforms a reference implementation and examples of what is possible. They can pick and choose what they want to implement on their platforms.

Nomadic Identity in the Fediverse

Many of these ideas are being ported to ActivityPub in the form of Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEPs).

For example, Streams, which is one of the platforms that support Nomad Protocol, is working with Mitra to create the first implementation of nomadic identity over ActivityPub. This includes working on several related FEPs about identity proofs and conversation containers.

Our goal is for these technologies to spread throughout the fediverse.

Purpose of this Website

One of the purposes of this website is to document and promote the technology present in Zot and Nomad protocols, not just for our use, but also as inspiration for others. We hope that technologies like nomadic identity, identity proofs, access control, conversation containers, and federated single sign on work, not only across platforms, but also across protocols.

Relation to the Rest of the Fediverse

The fediverse is and always will be multi-protocol. Protocols like Zot Protocol (used by Hubzilla and Streams), Nomad Protocol (used by Streams), and Diaspora (used by Friendica and Diaspora*) are still in use today.

This diagram gives a great overview of the fediverse and its many protocols. Although certain details need to be updated.