An approach to group software built from small, linkable units of social context, with the Weave Interaction Pattern (WIP) as its open standard for creating, searching, linking and organising them across groupware tools. The WIP is a set of conventions on top of Holochain: assets and their identifiers and semantic trees, Weave Asset Locators (a Holochain resource locator plus an asset identifier) that let one tool point at another's data, renderer types a tool must provide, search and discovery functions, notification definitions, and shared group services. It is not a formal specification today: the project says it is deliberately not writing a hard spec yet, and the developer documentation is marked as under construction. Moss is its reference runtime.
LicenseSoftware: Moss (the reference runtime) is CAL-1.0 per its README; licences for the WIP documentation's APIs and tooling are not stated in the cited sources. Website content: CC BY-SA 4.0. https://github.com/lightningrodlabs/moss
Dev Status 🔨 WIP
OwnerLightningrod Labs and Holochain (as the project's site states: "brought to you by")
Governing BodyLightningrod Labs and Holochain; no governance process documented. Default Tool curation list maintained by Lightningrod Labs
Country Not stated by the project.
Start Year 2022
StackHolochain; TypeScript (@theweave/api WeaveClient); Moss as the reference frame (Rust / TypeScript)
Funding Not stated by the project.
Last Investigated Oct 29, 2026
Topology view
This tool in the centre and the things it is directly related to. Each line names the kind of relationship.
Holochain (Tool): Basis for, Built on, Speaks protocol, Stores in
OriginsGroupware that works without central infrastructure: members keep ownership of their data, tools can be added to the ecosystem, and search spans all of a member's groups; the pattern emerged from building a distributed groupware platform rather than from a prior specification
DatabaseHolochain (a distributed hash table, with each group's data held in its members' own cells)
Query LanguageA Tool may define a search function accepting plain text or a semantic-tree regular expression
Data FormatsAsset Identifier and Asset Semantic Tree schemas; Weave Asset Locators (a Holochain resource locator plus an asset identifier); weave-0.15:// URLs; JSON Tool and Curation lists
Collaborative Live EditingN/A — a linking and discovery pattern; editing behaviour belongs to each Tool
Rich Text EditingN/A — a linking and discovery pattern; editing behaviour belongs to each Tool
Mobile SupportNot stated by the project (the Moss downloads the site lists are desktop builds)
Web Support Not stated by the project.
Native AppsMoss desktop apps for macOS, Linux and Windows
TermsFree and open source; Moss is CAL-1.0, website content CC BY-SA 4.0; licences of the WIP APIs are not stated
Funds Not stated by the project.
Based OnHolochain
Semantic Web Compatibility Not stated by the project (no RDF, JSON-LD or SPARQL mentioned in the cited sources).
Protocol Maturity / StandardizationEmerging pattern, no formal specification; developer documentation under construction
Vocabulary / Ontology TypeAsset Identifier and Asset Semantic Tree schemas; Weave Asset Locators; renderer, search and notification definitions that a Tool declares
Usage PatternEmbedded in applications: Tools are Holochain apps that run inside a Weave frame, of which Moss is the reference implementation
Relationships
How this tool connects to other tools and organizations, from relationships reviewed by the OpenHaven data steward. They describe how projects connect, not how good they are.