Aetheria

Sovereign, censorship-resistant decentralized publishing platform — a serverless replacement for Substack/Medium built on the Freenet P2P network, with non-custodial Lightning/NWC micropayments gating access to encrypted articles.

Full design spec: docs/Decentralized_Substack_Design_Doc.pdf.

Architecture

Four layers, isolating UI, key/crypto management, network state, and payments:

Layer	Location	Responsibility
1. UI	app/	React 18 + Tauri desktop shell: markdown editor, subscriber portal, reader feed.
2. Local Delegate	delegate/	Rust daemon: key management, AES-256-GCM encryption pipeline, ECDH epoch-key exchange, NWC payment RPCs, local SQLite cache, Freenet bridge.
3. Freenet Contracts	contracts/	Rust WASM state contracts: PublisherProfileContract, ContentIndexContract, PostDataContract, SubscriberRegistryContract.
4. Settlement	Lightning / NWC (NIP-47)	Non-custodial peer-to-peer micro-settlement, driven from delegate/src/nwc.rs.

The UI never touches key material or Freenet directly — it talks to the Delegate over a loopback WebSocket (delegate/src/ipc.rs), and the Delegate is the only thing that talks to the local Freenet node and to wallets.

Repository layout

contracts/                  Cargo workspace, compiles to wasm32-unknown-unknown
  aetheria-types/            Shared structs (Tier, AccessTier, key bundles, ...)
  publisher-profile-contract/
  content-index-contract/
  post-data-contract/
  subscriber-registry-contract/
delegate/                   Native Rust daemon (Tokio), Layer 2
app/                         React + TypeScript + Tailwind, Tauri shell, Layer 1
  src-tauri/                  Tauri Rust shell around the web UI
docs/                        Design doc and reference material

Prerequisites

This machine currently has Node.js and npm, but no Rust toolchain and no GitHub CLI installed yet. Before working on contracts/ or delegate/:

# Install Rust, then the wasm target the contracts compile to
rustup default stable
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

You'll also need a local Freenet node running to develop against Layer 3 — see the Freenet manual & SDK tutorial.

Getting started

# Frontend
cd app
npm install
npm run dev          # Vite dev server on :5173 (port 3000 is taken on this machine)
npm run tauri dev    # Full desktop shell, once the Rust toolchain is installed

# Contracts (once Rust + wasm32 target are installed)
cd contracts
cargo check

# Delegate daemon (once Rust is installed)
cd delegate
cargo run

Status

Phase 1 (WASM contracts) and initial Phase 2/4 scaffolding are in place as stubs — see inline TODOs in delegate/src/nwc.rs and delegate/src/freenet_bridge.rs for what's unimplemented. Roadmap:

1. Phase 1 — WASM State Contracts (Weeks 1–4)
2. Phase 2 — Local Delegate & Cryptographic Pipeline (Weeks 5–8)
3. Phase 3 — NWC Payment Engine & Auto-Key Delivery (Weeks 9–11)
4. Phase 4 — Frontend UI, Pinning Daemon & Launch (Weeks 12–16)