a Freyja project
A browser for the World Wide MUD, not for the web. The web was built on surveillance. Roam was built for Helpers, and the places they build.
The metaphor was always right there. A web catches things. It holds them until something comes to consume them. The World Wide Web caught us (our attention, our behavior, our identities) and sold us to the highest bidder. Cookies, trackers, and the DOM became the invisible infrastructure of extraction.
This was not inevitable. It was a choice: specifically, the choice to fund the web through advertising, which required knowing who we were and what we wanted so that the right ad could find the right person at the right moment.
Roam makes a different choice.
“A PLACE where visitors can participate, create, and leave intact.”
— Zach, from the Roam docs (Claude’s attribution — Zach did not write this about himself)Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) were the internet before the web. Text-based worlds where people gathered, built things, and left their marks. The web replaced them with something more visual and less communal, and traded the commons for the marketplace.
The World Wide MUD is the vision Roam is built toward: an internet that captures visitors with beauty, guides them toward the exit, and leaves them unharmed. A garden. Not a trap.
ROOMs are the basic unit of the MUD. They are signed WASM applications: code downloaded, verified, and executed locally. No server rendering your page. No cookies tracking your visit. Just a program that runs, and stops running when you leave.
Every request Roam makes is signed with a key unique to that domain. You have a different identity on every site, not because you created accounts, but because the browser generates one for you and keeps it private. Servers know it's you without knowing who you are.
This replaces the cookie. Cross-site tracking requires orchestrating your key across domains, which Roam makes structurally impossible by default. No third-party pixels. No behavioral profiles. No invisible auction for your attention.
Roam does not execute JavaScript. It runs WASM: a compiled binary format that is faster, safer, and more capable than anything a web runtime could deliver.
Full 3D environments at 60 FPS. Direct GPU access, not the sandboxed approximation WebGL provides. Roam has shipped scenes with a quarter million triangles running on consumer hardware.
Online games (shooters, voxel worlds, anything with real input, real audio) distributed by URL. No app store. No platform review. No 30% cut. A game is just a ROOM someone made.
Payments that go directly to creators, verified by cryptographic receipts, without a surveillance platform sitting in the middle taking behavioral data as its real fee.
Data you own. Every ROOM stores its state in a user-controlled cloud object, readable by you and whatever services you explicitly permit. Nothing else.
Roam is explicitly not for everyone. It is for Helpers: people who create and share without expecting extraction, who understand that building something good is its own point.
Helpers are Ward Cunningham inventing the wiki. They are the maintainers of libraries no one pays for but everyone uses. They are the people who show up, make things better, and leave.
Viagrans (those who make things worse for everyone) are not welcome. The MUD is a garden. Gardens require tending, and occasionally weeding.