Unseenet Working Group                                     A. Lorensen
UN-RFC: 0001                                              October 2026
Category: Informational
Status: Draft

                Unseenet: Architecture and Terminology

Abstract¶

Unseenet is a decentralized discussion network modeled on Usenet, carried over Tor onion services, with signed articles, optional end-to-end encrypted groups and proof-of-work spam resistance. This document describes the overall architecture and defines common terms. It is non-normative; the normative rules are in UN-RFC 0002 to 0006.

1. Goals¶

Easy access. A person should be able to join groups and chats by running a single program, e.g. from a USB stick, with no installation, no account registration, no public IP and no port forwarding.
Decentralization. No central server, registry or company. Anyone can run a node; nodes replicate groups to each other the way Usenet servers did.
Confidentiality where wanted. Closed groups are end-to-end encrypted; nodes carry ciphertext they cannot read.
Resilience to seizure. A seized node or USB stick should reveal as little as possible (see UN-RFC 0007).
Open protocol. Anybody can write a compatible node or client from these documents alone.

1.1 Non-Goals¶

Binary file distribution. Unseenet is a text network. Articles are small (UN-RFC 0002 sets a default limit of 64 KiB). This keeps storage bounded and limits node operators' legal exposure.
Global consensus. There is no global list of groups or users. Each node carries what its operator chooses.
Perfect anonymity against a global adversary. Unseenet inherits Tor's threat model and does not improve on it.

2. Terminology¶

Node : A long-running server, reachable as a Tor onion service, that stores articles and replicates them to other nodes. Comparable to a Usenet news server or an old BBS.

Client : A program a person uses to read and post. It connects to one or more nodes over Tor. Typically portable (USB) and stores its data encrypted.

Peer : Another node with which a node exchanges articles.

Feed : The stream of articles a node offers to a peer.

Article : The unit of content. A header block and a body, signed by its author (UN-RFC 0002).

Identity : An Ed25519 key pair. The public key is the identity; display names are just labels (UN-RFC 0003).

Group : A named stream of articles, owned by an identity and described by a signed manifest (UN-RFC 0004).

Manifest : A signed control article that defines a group's name, type, owner, moderators and policy.

Group ID : The globally unique name of a group: a human-readable name plus a fingerprint of the owner's key, e.g. dk.snak@ab3k5x7qwe2rtz4m.

Closed group : A group whose article bodies and sensitive headers are encrypted with a key shared only among members.

Postage : A proof-of-work value attached to an article to make mass posting expensive (UN-RFC 0006).

3. Architecture¶

  +--------+        Tor         +--------+   Tor (peering)  +--------+
  | Client | <----------------> | Node A | <--------------> | Node B |
  +--------+   ONNTP reader      +--------+                  +--------+
   (USB)                             ^                           ^
                                     |       Tor (peering)       |
                                     +-------> +--------+ <------+
                                               | Node C |
                                               +--------+

Every node is a Tor onion service. Its .onion address is derived from its service key, so the address itself authenticates the node. No TLS, certificates or DNS are needed.
Clients and nodes speak ONNTP (UN-RFC 0005): a strict subset of NNTP (RFC 3977) with streaming feeds (RFC 4644), over Tor.
Nodes replicate articles by flood-fill: when a node accepts a new article it offers it to all peers that carry the group. Duplicate suppression uses the Message-ID, which is a hash of the article's content (UN-RFC 0002), so it cannot be forged or collide by accident.
Unlike Usenet, there is no Path header. The route an article took is not recorded, because it leaks where an article entered the network.

4. The Three Authorities¶

Unseenet deliberately splits control between three parties, so that no single party decides everything:

Party	Decides
Group owner	Group type, who may post, who may read (closed groups), moderators
Node operator	Which groups and peers the node carries, retention, minimum postage
Reader	What they see: filters, trust, which identities to ignore

A group owner cannot force a node to carry a group. A node operator cannot forge or alter articles (they are signed) and cannot read closed groups. A reader can always hide content locally.

5. Group Types (summary)¶

Type	Read	Post	Encrypted
open	anyone	anyone (signed, with postage)	no
moderated	anyone	moderators, or with moderator approval	no
channel	anyone	owner and listed posters only	no
closed	members only	members only	yes, E2E

"Chats" are, in this first series, closed (or open) groups with short retention, used by clients in a conversational way. A low-latency delivery mechanism is reserved for UN-RFC 0008.

6. Relationship to Usenet¶

What is kept: hierarchical group names, a store-and-forward network of independently operated servers, NNTP as the wire protocol, Message-IDs, References threading, the freedom of each server to choose its feeds.

What is changed: articles are signed; groups are owned and their control messages are signed (no forged newgroup/rmgroup/cancel); Message-IDs are content hashes; there is no Path; transport is Tor; closed groups are encrypted; spam is priced with proof-of-work.

7. Security Considerations¶

See UN-RFC 0003 (cryptography), 0004 (group access), 0006 (spam) and 0007 (data at rest). Briefly: content confidentiality is only provided for closed groups; metadata (group ID, size, approximate time, author key) is visible to nodes for all articles.