Why Anahita

Anahita is a social software platform organizations use to foster community engagement in settings such as schools, newsrooms, libraries, university research groups, or non-governmental organizations.

Anahita instances communicate with each other and the global network of social networks, blogs, and online forums that utilize either ActivityPub or the AT Protocol. This enables seamless interaction while keeping your original data and files on your server, governed by your privacy and moderation policies. Key concepts in Anahita's design philosophy include:

The principles

Five choices, each a rule for whoever changes the code.

1. Federation first, and only with consent. Anahita speaks ActivityPub and the AT Protocol natively, so that a community on it is not a walled garden: its people can follow and be followed by people on other servers and on Bluesky. Each profile chooses whether to federate. Sharing is consented to, never assumed. Nothing is built that does not federate sensibly. See Federation.
2. The feed is chronological. The home page is what the people, groups and events somebody follows posted, newest first. There is no ranked feed chosen for them. A ranked feed is one a person makes, and is always called a custom feed. See Custom feeds.
3. Nobody is tracked. There are no profile analytics, no share counts, no lists of who viewed what. A like is counted because somebody chose to like; a view is not, because nobody chose to be seen viewing. Who may see what is each person's choice: see Privacy.
4. Old and useful counts as much as new. A community builds knowledge as well as news: a school's notes, a library's guides, a research group's findings stay useful for years. Nothing is pushed down only for being old, and how fast interest fades is the operator's choice. See How things are found.
5. The breadth is the product. Groups, events, articles, topics, photos, videos and custom feeds, in one place, for the organisations that need more than a stream of short posts.

Each has a cost. A chronological feed asks people to choose whom to follow with care. Without tracking, there is less to tell an operator how the site is used. Without ranking by engagement, a lively post does not reach strangers on its own. These are costs Anahita chooses to pay.

Two networks, not a third

There are two open ways for social software to talk to each other now: ActivityPub, which Mastodon and most of the fediverse speak, and the AT Protocol, which Bluesky speaks. They are built on different ideas.

• ActivityPub is servers sending each other messages. A person's identity is on the server they joined (@ana@example.org), and that server holds their keys and speaks for them.
• The AT Protocol gives a person an identity of their own, a DID, and a repository of what they posted that any app can read and that can move between hosts. Apps read the whole network through relays.

Anahita takes part in both rather than inventing a third. On the fediverse it is a server; on Bluesky it is an app, with the account a person already has. A server on one network, an app on the other says what follows from that.

Everything is a node

Inside, Anahita is one idea: everything is a node, and every relationship between two things is an edge. A person, a group, a post, a hashtag, a place and a feed are nodes; following, liking, tagging, citing and saving are edges. A post from another server is a node too, so feeds, follows and blocks need nothing new for it.

That one shape is what lets a group's events, a person's photos and a hashtag's posts be read, permitted, searched and suggested in the same way. See The graph.

Further reading

The protocols Anahita speaks, for those who want to know them from the source. Each is described for Anahita in Federation.

	Read
ActivityPub	The W3C recommendation (opens in a new tab), and activitypub.rocks (opens in a new tab)
The AT Protocol	atproto.com's docs (opens in a new tab), beginning with the overview (opens in a new tab)
The AT Protocol's design	Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media (opens in a new tab), by the people who designed it