Platform Protocol
The platform protocol gives Nimi worlds a shared language. It doesn't remove creative freedom from world creators; it gives worlds enough common structure for identity, agents, social state, and movement to remain meaningful across surfaces.
This page is a reader-facing summary. The authoritative protocol rules live in the platform kernel under the P-PROTO-* rule family.
The Six Primitives
Each primitive is a small, fixed contract surface. A world is free to define its own internal rules, but anything that crosses worlds has to fit one of these primitives.
| Primitive | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Timeflow | Progression, timing, and temporal meaning across worlds |
| Social | Relationships and social graph semantics |
| Economy | Value, exchange, and economic state |
| Transit | Movement between worlds or contexts |
| Context | Shared situational meaning |
| Presence | Who or what is present, and under what conditions |
The primitives are deliberately abstract. Timeflow does not say "an hour is sixty minutes." It says how progression is represented when one world's clock has to be interpreted by another world or surface.
Why Protocol Comes Before Features
Without protocol, every feature becomes local. A world says one thing, a Desktop surface implies another, and an agent acts on a third. The platform protocol prevents that drift by giving shared semantics a home that no single feature can quietly redefine.
That principle has a practical consequence. New product features that touch cross-world meaning must go through the protocol, not around it. A feature that invented its own social graph would not be a feature extension; it would be a parallel authority.
Reader Scenario: Two Worlds Recognizing The Same Friendship
Suppose Alice and Bob are friends in World A. Bob also visits World B. The Social primitive describes how that friendship is represented when it crosses worlds:
- The friendship has a representation that both worlds can read.
- World B is allowed to apply its own local social rules. Maybe in World B "friend" only grants chat access; maybe World A's friendship carries economic privileges.
- World A's truth about the friendship does not retroactively change when Bob visits World B; if anything changes, it has to be recorded under each world's authority.
The Social primitive does not force every world to model friendship the same way. It forces worlds to express friendship in a contract surface that other worlds can understand without misreading the meaning.
Where Protocol Sits Relative To Realm
The protocol is a contract surface for cross-world meaning. Realm is where world truth actually lives. The two are related but distinct:
- Protocol is the language.
- Realm is the persistent meaning expressed in that language.
When a world advances state, the change is anchored in Realm. When that change has to be visible to another surface, the protocol primitives are how it is expressed.
Reader Scenario: A Workflow That Touches Multiple Primitives
Suppose a world hosts a small marketplace event. During the event:
- Timeflow advances the event's state from "scheduled" to "running" to "ended."
- Presence says which agents and users are currently in the event space.
- Social records that two participants formed a connection during the event.
- Economy records that one participant bought an item.
- Transit governs how a participant leaves the event for another world afterward.
- Context lets surfaces share the situational meaning of the event while it is running, so an agent participant knows what is happening without re-reading every other primitive.
Six primitives sound abstract on their own. In a normal world flow, they show up together.