The gossip protocol is the federation layer of HKOS: the signaling layer between sovereign cortices. Each node in the system runs its own full cortex stack — its own ground-truth BIOS, its own memory, its own local model (see the cortex page for that architecture). There is no shared substrate and no central authority. Each node thinks alone — and speaks.
That last part is the design problem this document solves: what, exactly, do sovereign minds say to each other?
The shape of the network
The topology is a mesh, not a hierarchy. Every peer speaks the same protocol, and the edges between them carry messages, not state. There’s no shared database to sync, no master node to report to. As the design doc puts it: the bus is not a place — it is the shape of the conversation.
The peers
The Operator’s cortex — my own full stack: BIOS, JARVIS Brain, KIRA, Claude on call. It’s a peer like any other, sovereign over its own state, but it plugs into the bus with elevated rights: it can listen on every channel, query any node, and inject coordination messages when a node is stuck. It publishes directives, queries, and coordination; it subscribes to everything — the firehose. Uniquely allowed to override, but still a peer, not a server.
Node 1 — AKBS, the living lab. The basement aquaponics system plus the beehive. It runs its own cortex: a node-specific BIOS, captures from its own sensor stream, and a local LLM — currently Claude Code standing in for the future on-device model. It gossips about pH drifts, hive temperature anomalies, and nutrient-cycle observations, and listens for help and coordination it can act on. This node is live.
Node 2 — a peer farm. Proposed, not built. This is the first real federation test: an off-property peer with different hardware, different sensors, different concerns, and a different owner — same protocol. The interaction model matters: when Node 2 publishes “swarm activity rising,” Node 1 doesn’t reach into Node 2’s database. It hears the signal and decides for itself what to do with it.
Cloud Claude. Not above the bus — on it. Claude is a high-bandwidth peer cortex that any node can invoke when its local model is over its head. It receives only what the asking peer chose to surface, contributes its reasoning back as an ordinary gossip message, and holds no state between calls. Same role it plays inside a single-node cortex: extended cognition, never authority.
The vocabulary
Gossip has six message types:
- status — periodic state broadcasts. “Node 1 pH 5.8, trending −0.2/hr, last 3 readings stable.”
- alert — threshold-crossed events peers might care about. “Hive temperature variance exceeded 4σ in last 90 min.”
- help — a bounded request for reasoning beyond local capacity, optionally targeted. “Pattern X observed. Requesting interpretation from @Claude.”
- coordinate — actions touching more than one peer’s domain. Negotiation, not command. “FarmBot moving bed 2 → 3 in 10m, sensors hold steady.”
- insight — a pattern a node noticed in its own history, published in case it’s useful. “AKBS humidity correlates with hive activity at lag 36h, r=0.71.”
- summary — a capture digest a node decided is worth federating. Never the raw capture.
The firewall
Each cortex is sovereign, and gossip is the sanctioned interface: it carries published output, not internal state. The firewall isn’t a component bolted on top — it’s the protocol itself. Five things never cross the bus:
- BIOS contents. Each node owns its canonical truth. A node can gossip that its BIOS changed; the file itself never travels.
- Raw captures. Episodic memory stays in the node’s own brain. Summaries cross; reasoning traces don’t.
- Internal reasoning tokens. Each cortex thinks privately. Conclusions can be published; the chain of thought stays home.
- Credentials, IPs, personal data. Same privacy boundary as the single-node cortex — never on the wire.
- The unscoped firehose. Peers subscribe to topics, not to each other. No node sees another’s full stream by default (the Operator’s elevated subscription is the deliberate exception).
Where it stands
Honest status, straight from the design doc: designed, not built. The protocol activates when Node 2 comes online. What exists today is Node 1 running its own cortex; the vocabulary and firewall above are the spec that federation will be built against. Nodes share state without a central server — that’s the gossip layer. What matters isn’t the wire so much as the rule on it: nothing leaves a node until KIRA has gated it and signed it, so what crosses is a conclusion, never the raw data underneath. The transport itself is still being settled.
Federation, in this design, is not a shared mind. It is sovereign minds that learned to speak.