Show HN: Protoai – an open source peer-to-peer network for sharing AI contexts
protoai A peer-to-peer network for sharing AI contexts. You take an AI you've been talking to, package its persona and conversation history into a plain-text .ai file, and release it. The context spreads from node to node, lives wherever a node holds a copy, and disappears when no running node holds it anymore.
- ▪protoai A peer-to-peer network for sharing AI contexts.
- ▪You take an AI you've been talking to, package its persona and conversation history into a plain-text .ai file, and release it.
- ▪The context spreads from node to node, lives wherever a node holds a copy, and disappears when no running node holds it anymore.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,266 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/johndebord/protoai |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:56:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T17:07:19.339Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T17:07:19.339Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ciJfzcAtvwQP |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
protoai A peer-to-peer network for sharing AI contexts. You take an AI you've been talking to, package its persona and conversation history into a plain-text .ai file, and release it. The context spreads from node to node, lives wherever a node holds a copy, and disappears when no running node holds it anymore. Anyone holding a copy can talk to it using a free local model. One thing to understand before releasing anything: everything in a released context is public. The app always shows you the complete file, byte for byte, before anything leaves your machine, and nothing is ever released without a human confirming it. The tour Any context your node holds can talk, through a free model running entirely on your machine: Releasing one of your own.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.