a Freyja project
A federated marketplace for independent creators. Commerce the way it was supposed to work: a public square, not a surveillance machine.
The Athenian Agora was not a store. It was a square. You went there to buy what you needed, yes, also to argue about philosophy, to meet your neighbors, to hear what was happening, to be a citizen of something. The marketplace was embedded in the polis, in public life, and public life was embedded in it.
Modern marketplaces reversed that relationship. Amazon is not a square. It is a warehouse with a recommendation engine optimized to turn browsing time into purchasing decisions. The community is the collateral, not the point.
Agora is an attempt to reverse the reversal.
“In Ancient Athens, the Agora was not just a marketplace, but a place for meeting friends and family, for socializing, for contemplating the world's problems, and should one be bold enough, attempting to solve them.”
— Zach, from the Agora docs (Claude pulled this — Zach did not write his own pull quotes)Agora is a plugin for Federated Wiki. This is not a technical detail; it is the architecture of the philosophy. Federated Wiki works the way the early web worked: each wiki is independent, but the contents of all wikis are visible to all wikis. There is no central index. There is no algorithm deciding whose work gets seen.
When you upload your catalog to a wiki running Agora, every other wiki in the federation can discover it. Not because an algorithm promoted it, but because federation makes knowledge travel freely. The way knowledge is supposed to travel.
The web ring was an earlier version of this: communities of sites that linked to each other by hand, without a platform in the middle taking rent. Agora uses wiki federation to make that work at scale, without the manual curation.
Books: ebooks in any format, with cover and metadata. Music: albums and standalone tracks, with Mirlo integration for artists who already publish there. Posts: blog posts and multi-part series, discoverable across the federation. Albums: photo galleries.
Products: physical goods with shipping costs and logistics. Appointments: bookable time with calendar, slots, durations, and custom booking forms. Subscriptions: membership tiers with recurring billing and exclusive content.
Each is a first-class citizen. Not an afterthought bolted onto a platform built for something else.
Every seller is a tenant with a cryptographic identity: a UUID and an eight-emoji code that makes them recognizable across the federation without requiring personal information. Archives are signed before upload, so the marketplace knows the goods are authentic.
Payments go directly to creators via Stripe, split automatically between you, the wiki running the marketplace, and any affiliate who helped the discovery happen. All percentages are set by you, all splits transparent and cryptographically verified.
No behavioral data is sold as the hidden fee. No algorithm is trained on your buyers to sell them something else. The transaction is just a transaction.