About

Anahita is an open-source project of rmd studio (opens in a new tab), founded by Rastin Mehr, its core architect, and made in Vancouver, Canada.

The exact start date of the Anahita project is unknown. The idea emerged in the mid-2000s, while Rastin Mehr, Anahita's founder and core architect, was a building online learning tools in their first job out of school and contributing to the open-source Joomla! (opens in a new tab) CMS in their free time.

They dreamed of an open-source platform for sharing knowledge and connecting people, and it led them to leave their job and work full-time on their own software company, rmd studio (opens in a new tab), and on what would become the Anahita social networking platform and framework.

A few months later, Rastin met Ash at a Facebook Developers event, and they became business associates and collaborators on Anahita for the next six years, including their time at Mozilla's WebFWD incubator. It was a formative time. With the help and guidance of Johan Janssens, co-founder of Joomla! and founder of Timble, who was Anahita's mentor until 2017, they developed many of the core ideas of Anahita's design: its graph architecture, a privacy system built on the social graph, and different kinds of nodes, such as actors and media. They first built Anahita as a PHP extension of the Joomla! CMS, but after a few releases they forked Joomla! to fit Anahita's architecture better.

After Ash's departure in 2013, Rastin went on maintaining and reshaping the codebase until it became a standalone client-server platform and framework for building projects on a social networking infrastructure.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Rastin experimented with microservices, and in 2023 they decided to reimagine and rebuild Anahita from the ground up in Go, as a collection of services, true to their original idea of a real graph architecture, now for the decentralised web and the fediverse. The result is the codebase we have today.

Anahita is named after the Persian goddess of the waters, of love, fertility and wisdom. Its first public instance, Banu.io, is on its way. Banu means a lady of high standing.

Much of the API and documentation on this website is written by Claude, based on code and material Rastin Mehr has written over the past 15+ years about Anahita's design philosophy and system architecture. Rastin personally reviews all the documentation before publishing. All the content on the About and Blog pages is written by Rastin Mehr and proofread by Grammarly and macOS writing tools.