Why Bigfoot

The web is the social network.

The web does not belong to any one person or company. It belongs to everyone.

But too often, participating means passing through someone else’s gate. Finding information means accepting a search provider’s view. Discussing it means entering a social platform. Learning about a business means consulting separate review services, each deciding which experiences count and how they appear.

Those services can have a place on the web without owning our place in it.

Bigfoot is being built to bring discovery, publishing, and conversation into a participant-run network. Find people, original writing, websites, and discussions. Discover a business through the experiences people share about it, or encounter those experiences while visiting its website.

The conversation can lead you to the page. The page can lead you to the conversation. Neither has to belong to the service through which you found it.

Websites remain free to choose what they publish. People remain free to discuss them independently. The applications that bring those discussions into view are ways into the network, not owners of the conversation.

Discovery is part of the network

Being able to publish is only part of participating. People also need a way to find one another.

Bigfoot’s search brings together public webpages and contributions published within the network. You can start with a subject, a person, a business, or a question, explore related discussions, and follow an author whose perspective interests you.

Nor does every conversation need an external website behind it. Spaces provide places for original writing and discussion within the network itself.

The network supplies shared information. Different applications can organize, filter, and present it in different ways, without one feed or presentation defining the network.

The information is shared. The view is yours to choose.

They own the page. Not the conversation.

A publisher should be free to decide what appears on its website. A business should be free to present its products. Nobody should have to install a comment section or host someone else’s speech.

But that should not decide whether people can discuss them.

With Bigfoot, a conversation can appear beside a webpage without becoming part of the website’s own content. The website supplies the page. The network supplies the independent discussion. Your browser brings them together, whether the site welcomes comments, closes them on selected articles, or never offers them at all.

Customer experiences, employee perspectives, and discussions about a company’s products can be found through the network and brought into view alongside the business they concern.

A person looking for employment and a person considering a purchase may want different perspectives. They can choose different views without requiring separate platforms to own each category of discussion.

Owning the place being discussed should not mean controlling the discussion about it.

Independence needs somewhere to live

If every contribution depends on one company’s servers, moving a conversation outside a website simply gives it a different gatekeeper.

Bigfoot is a peer-to-peer network: participating devices help store, copy, and supply public records under shared rules, called the protocol. Providing that capacity does not make operators the owners or editors of the records they carry. Their work must meet the protocol’s requirements.

Keeping copies across participants helps prevent one provider’s decision, failure, or disappearance from becoming a veto over access. It provides resilience without promising that every record will remain available forever.

Bigfoot Browser provides a way to access and support that shared network. Conversations do not belong to the browser or the company that publishes it.

Choosing what you see is not deciding what exists

A shared public network does not mean everyone must encounter everything.

People need ways to avoid unwanted interactions, choose subjects, follow particular contributors, and shape their own experience. Different communities can develop different preferences without turning each preference into a rule for the entire network.

A discussion can remain accessible to people who seek it without being forced into everyone else’s view. Hiding a contribution in one interface is different from erasing it from the network.

That is the principle behind Bigfoot’s approach to censorship resistance: an interface should control its presentation, not the existence of everybody else’s conversation.

Public persistence is also a serious commitment. Filtering a post is not a retraction, and removing one copy does not erase copies held elsewhere. A contribution’s presence on Bigfoot says nothing about whether it is true or whether Soliton Group LLC endorses it.

Sustain participation without selling the participants

A network needs resources. Storing records, supplying information, and helping people find it all require work.

BFT is Bigfoot’s network currency and accounting unit. Ordinary reading and searching carry no BFT charge. Publishing, replying, and other actions that consume shared resources use BFT.

The network credits newly issued BFT for qualifying, verified network work. Authors can receive a share of the existing BFT spent on replies to their contributions. These connect the work that supports the network with the participation it makes possible.

Public writing can remain available to readers while discussion helps support its authors, without requiring a separate subscription to every author. Credits depend on qualifying activity; simply leaving a device online does not guarantee any BFT.

Soliton Group LLC maintains the protocol and official software and receives the protocol support fee. Governance members are volunteers and do not share that fee. How Bigfoot is funded explains the economics; the Governance document explains stewardship and network roles.

The network should sustain the connection between people. Connecting people should not merely be a way to assemble an audience for somebody else to sell.

Public conversation without private surveillance

Ordinary participation does not require a central personal account, and advertising is not Bigfoot’s funding model. A network identity lets you authorize your contributions without supplying your legal name.

Public posts are still public. Publishing without a conventional account does not, by itself, guarantee anonymity. The distinction is between information someone deliberately contributes and the private activity surrounding it.

Sharing an opinion should not require turning the rest of a person’s browsing life into material for an advertising profile. Discovering a discussion should not depend on surrendering a detailed account of everything else that interests them.

Text, with room for context

Bigfoot’s conversations are built around text. There is room to explain an experience, develop an argument, ask a question, or publish an idea. Writing lets someone follow your reasoning, return to a particular point, and respond in their own words.

That does not mean every discussion must be serious or academic. People can write about what matters to them, or what simply interests or entertains them.

A response can be a contribution in its own right. A discussion can be worth discovering independently of the page that started it.

A network we can help shape

Bigfoot brings discovery, conversation, and participation together in a network people help operate and can encounter throughout the web.

People can find one another, publish their own ideas, discuss the places they visit, and choose how that shared information becomes part of their lives. Their experiences and practical contributions can help improve it. Get in touch to share yours.

The web does not belong to any one person or company. It belongs to everyone.