Mere is a platform for showing data in useful projections, reaching it peer-to-peer wherever it lives, and sharing it on the user's terms. Each data domain lives in a mere: a spatial graph of resources and the nodes they are met through, which hosts project into canvases, tiles, and panes. Mere is not a browser; Turnstone is the browser built on it.
Graphshell, Mere's reference host: a local graph arranged through the product's own search, relation, and scene controls.
Pre-release, under active development.
- Cargo workspace of 100 members: 87 crates and 13 packages under
ports/. Themerefacade crate re-exports members behind capability features (graph, linked-data, canvas, workbench, query). - Graph canvas, chrome shell, HTML and smolweb content lanes, session persistence, comms, and SPARQL query are implemented to varying degrees. Peer sync, federation, and local intelligence are partially wired.
- Milestones through 2026-08-12: mesh substrate and job leases (2026-08-09), wallet carry fold-in and OTP core (2026-08-10), first mesh consumer port running over real peer transport (2026-08-12).
- Workspace version 0.0.1. A few crates are published individually
(muniment, chartulary, seiche, personae, stickleback); the rest set
publish = false. - Sibling repos genet, netrender, and retinue arrive as git dependencies, so portable builds resolve published revisions. Rust pinned at 1.98.1.
Current plans live in design_docs/: distillery
follow-on slices, device-grant delegation, castellan sealed credentials, and
wiring the remaining unconsumed crates into hosts.
The graph: what a mere holds.
- Resource: what a canonical URL identifies. Claims about it (what a page says, cites, or derives from, and its tags) attach to the resource, each kept with who asserted it.
- Surface: what the user browses in. A surface shows one resource at a time; navigating changes which. Resources and surfaces are both nodes of the graph.
- Strata: the resource stratum (what things are) under the surface stratum (how they were met: trail, layout, groupings).
- Aspect: any way of dividing the graph: strata, planes (truth and curation), keeping, attention, socialization tiers, coverage.
A graph becomes a picture through two grammars that share one binding.
Projection: what is shown, and where.
- Projection grammar: the reusable vocabulary and operations: selection, derivation, visual encoding, arrangements, backgrounds, interactions, and provenance.
- Scene recipe: a particular composition of those choices, which can be saved, edited, and reused.
- Domain binding: which disclosed facts and permitted actions supply that recipe.
So a timeline recipe isn't inherently a music feature or a writing feature. A domain supplies meaningful temporal facts; the recipe makes them legible. Likewise, a relationship layout can present lexical connections, musical relationships, or research references without treating those relationships as semantically identical.
Dynamics: how things move.
- Dynamics grammar: the reusable vocabulary of motion: terms (what acts on what, by which rule, carrying which state), what kind of motion each makes, and how they combine (weighted sums, groups, schedules).
- Dynamics recipe: a particular composition of those terms, saved, edited, and reused like a scene recipe.
- The same domain binding supplies both: a scene recipe names an arrangement and, optionally, a dynamics recipe.
An arrangement is positions, not motion; physics acts on it. Each item's position is seeded (motion starts there), pinned (it stays) or anchored (it returns after a push or a drag), by the recipe's default or per item, seeded unless chosen. Meaning can live in the dynamics too: a semantic grouping becomes a pull among related items rather than a slot to return to.
A workbench's own structure of frames, tiles, and splits is a forme, not an arrangement. A physics simulation's bodies, joints, fields, and emitters are a world, not a scene.
Mere is consumed as a git dependency by
Turnstone (the browser app) and
other sibling repos. Runnable consumers in this repository live under ports/:
graphshell (the reference graph host and web presenter), djinn (the local
desktop resident), castellan (credential keeper), distillery (model works),
gazette (the directory port), moot (community: murmurs, moots, and coop), pelt
(the reference browser port over Genet's engine and Cambium's shell), signalman
(commissioning and operating Retinue stations), and tabard (theme authoring
for Genet).
Knot Editor is an independent
repository, not a Mere port: it owns files-in-place authoring, document and
vault authority, evidence, sync and publishing, and Djinn and Turnstone consume
it from one immutable revision through the generic Mere and Genet contracts. See
knot-editor/design_docs/2026-09-01_knot_editor_repository_extraction_plan.md.
cargo build
cargo test
cargo test -p mere-kernel # single crate, by package name
# Standalone graph canvas in its own window
cargo run -p mere-canvas --features native-present --bin canvasports/graphshell has no default binary; pick one explicitly (see
ports/graphshell/README.md).
The root Cargo.lock records the portable graph. Use cargo check --workspace --locked for that graph. Python 3.11+ can additionally check configuration,
package provenance and lock preservation with python scripts/cargo_mode.py verify. Run acceptance checks in a clean checkout with documented platform
prerequisites; a local-path build is a separate receipt.
For sibling development, copy .cargo/config.toml.example to
.cargo/config.local.toml and adjust its paths for your checkout layout. Existing
users run python scripts/cargo_mode.py setup once from the repository root:
it preserves current locks and renames ignored automatic configs to opt-in local
configs. It does not overwrite an existing local config or local lock.
python scripts/cargo_mode.py local check --workspace
python scripts/cargo_mode.py local check --manifest-path ports/graphshell/web/Cargo.toml --target wasm32-unknown-unknownThe launcher requires Cargo 1.97+ and selects <workspace>/.cargo/local/Cargo.lock
even with --manifest-path. Commands run from the selected workspace root;
other relative command arguments are interpreted there. Local commands load
root and nested local configs;
ordinary Cargo commands do not. Use the launcher for editor check commands too
(an absolute script path works from a member directory). Editor metadata using
bare Cargo sees the portable graph. Do not set a global lockfile redirect.
Nested workspace portable locks and platform gates are tracked separately in
the lattice plan.
Integration uses a tested set of published revisions. Local sibling changes do not require immediate Git repins, and pin-only commits do not trigger reciprocal repins. Advance pins when accepting a tested integration or a required fix.
MPL-2.0 (see LICENSE).
This README was generated by AI and will be edited by the author upon release.