Mori: A Local Web

What is Mori?

It’s a decentralized, community-scale web system. “Web” as in the “world wide web”, but instead of the world, it’s your town, city, or village.

Using LoRa radio communication as a backbone, sites are necessarily both light (no video streaming, no high-res images, no large files in general) and local. At first, this may seem like a detriment, though there’s a surprisingly large handful of desirable properties that emerge from these constraints, discussed here, resolving or otherwise sidestepping many bugs of the modern internet.

Hosting personal sites and forums, Mori prioritizes community-scale communication and connection. Since LoRa networks are locally, the LoRa-web binds the digital to the physical, bringing a sense of locality to the web.

Mori delivers light, local connection, not in opposition to the internet, but as an alternative.

Background

At the turn of the century, in the wake of the dot-com bubble collapse, companies hosting web services could no longer rely on investor funding to maintain their sites.

The internet was no longer a place to communicate freely, a passionate wild west; it had to be viable business. The economic structures that underpin the modern internet, the invasive and expansive sale of user data and attention, were a natural step to take given the centralized and hierarchal nature of internet infrastructure. A choice was made to run ads on virtually all web content.

This new internet, known as Web 2.0, is tough to escape. Our world is progressively leaving the physical behind for a frictionless, highly-efficient digital that promises endless entertainment and connection, an ever-accelerating torrent of information that grabs on tight and doesn’t like letting go. Worse yet, the companies running their businesses on this infrastructure are incentivised to make these systems efficient, pervasively integrated, and as consumptive of as much of your life as possible. It’s how they stay alive. It’s just the business model.

Philosophy

Mori is immune to monetization, geographically bounded, and runs atop entirely independent, decentralized hardware. Low throughput and high latency, physical properties of LoRa data transmission, mean that Mori services are restricted to light, local sites. No endless scroll, no tracking pixels, no targeted advertisements.

Just a tool. An independent tool that you own, that you use at your own discretion, and that exists to facilitate communication between you and your local community.

Tech Description

Mori runs as two components, a client that lets you surf the local net, and a gateway that connects you to it.

The client is just a web browser that is programmed to understand the Mori markup language, display styles that are encoded in said language, and provide an interface to see and request content from your local net. It’s the user facing component of Mori.

The gateway is the hardware that talks with the local net, requesting and sending data as prompted by the client. It runs as a user-space server that uses a Mori-native protocol stack for efficient, encrypted communication that’s programmed to make the most out of the underlying LoRa protocol hardware.

This has been the broad overview, but there’s a lot more! If you’re interested in setting up your own device, the philosophy that underlies the project, or the technical details, take a look at the linked pages in the nav bar.