The centre of all communications neworks are directories and messaging. Thus, the Nexus, the connection point between all, includes both. Identities are essential for all services and for protecting privacy with encryption, and messaging is essential for coordinating between individuals.
The Nexus is built upon Tendermint as the data logger/inter-node synchronisation engine, and uses dgraph to store the data.
The Dawn Nexus is really a generalised framework for cryptographic account based document sharing and editing. It provides the essential primitives to enable any communication of textual content without a central server, enabling editing, forking, merging, and using bots, moderated group systems. The design is agnostic as to whether it is on an unsecure or private network, it can be adapted to both closed, private systems as well as fully open, by configuring appropriate settings on a node, and for moderation, access to control bots that enforce moderation.
The accounts registry stores an account with an immutable identifier hash key, and attached to this is a username which does not have a uniqueness constraint, as well as a chain of cryptographic keys, the first and only mandatory one is a 256 bit elliptic curve public key for the matching private key, which acts as the primary identifier and authentication system for the entire Dawn Network, for a particular pseudonym/avatar.
Using the messaging system, it is possible to distribute the private key to trusted contacts by using AoNT followed by user controlled ratio of issued to required keys shared secrets key splitting, enabling the recovery of the account key even if all personal copies are lost, in fact this facility will be available to use for any sensitive file one wants to insure against loss of. This is also why accounts and messaging are tightly integrated.
The communication system is built on a design similar to bitmessage, but with a short and long message format for implementing both chat and email, integrated in much the same way as has been done with Facebook's messaging. This chat system will thus have the ability to redact posts, as will the email (the author cannot prevent viewing the history, however), to append reactions (emoticons) to pin or tag posts so they can be easily and quickly associated. Special types of pins exist also that mark special kinds of data being secure, persistent, loss-proofed storage, and are replicated securely across all user's devices as well as distributed shared secret files from associates.
The user will also have total control over what messages are processed and stored by their node. They can set nodes to run on a whitelist of accepted accounts, such as for an internal messaging system for an organisation, or a blacklist, which can not just hide from the user interface but also have the messages dropped, not stored and not relayed, as a social network regulation system to reduce the ability of malicious actors to broadcast rubbish to the network, be it spam, trolling, fraud, cyber-streaking, sexting and rotten.com type shock material, or what have you.
It also enables things like moderated chatrooms where there can be redactions to enforce such things as unvoicing, and various automatic automation functions like link previews.
The addition of the ability to modify, redact, assign ownership, granting owner privileges, and so forth, functions that are increasingly seeing use in many messaging systems, also happens to enable simple text document editing as an application for the data. Most document types have plain text encoding formats. So this also will include code. A full system for this would however be an extension (a CVS system), to allow more fine grained control than a single owner and write access permission, such as a quorum.
By creating a basic bot framework included with this, a fully moderated/curated group system can be implemented. All data formats start with description languages, in plain text, and have at base a spine, or trunk, from which many uses can be applied to the branching and merging of branches from this.
It is not intended that the message system be a monetising function in itself, but rather that it facilitates the collaboration of users to generate content, however, it can also enable checked citations whether in messages or in posts, referring to posts, or referring to messages (the references should be added as tags as per the data structure). However, I expect that much of the code will be reused in some way to implement the content monetisation Agora Network, which adds a layer of coordinating to deliver content to consumers and monetise this content based on this delivery.
