Kosmik: a commonplace for human knowledge

Kosmik 1.6 is out with publish mode!

The “published” form of a document could then be a network of interlinked chunks of text, graphics, etc — Ted Nelson, Literary Machines 1981.

When Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext in 1965 he had a grand vision: a connected library for all of human knowledge, available to anyone with editing capabilities that would allow people from the whole world to use fragments of texts, images, and any other media to create new versions of those fragments augmented by their own knowledge and insights.

By and large, the web made this happen, but it never went beyond the first few ideas of Nelson. It is still very hard to reference a block of content from someone’s website and to modify, edit and republish it while keeping the link to the original source.

In addition, the web focused on mostly static linear documents. With the advent of more visual and spatial apps, it is finally possible to publish documents with other types of structure and formats. 

Kosmik universes are visual canvases that can host any type of media. They can be connected together with links or structured inside cards, and the user can always easily alter the structure. Instead of scrolling on a page, a user can pan and zoom to discover content and explore relationships in a more meaningful way. And with the new publish mode, we are a step closer to realising Ted Nelson’s idea of an interconnected, reusable web of knowledge.

So what is publish mode?

Publish mode is a first step towards the ideal of a universal knowledge library. When you publish a Kosmik universe, anyone with the public link (even if they don’t have an account) can access it from their browser.

When you publish a universe, Kosmik creates an unencrypted branch that can be accessed in read-only mode, while the original branch stays private so you can continue to work on it without affecting the public version.

This means that when you modify a published universe, the public branch remains in its current state until you to choose to update it.

Collaboration, redefined

When you use Google Docs or Figma you invite people to collaborate on a document and, when they join, they can see exactly what you’re doing in real time. If you want to work privately, you can copy and paste data between a private, unshared document and a shared version but it’s a complex process.

In Kosmik we want to let people re-use objects from public universes through transclusion. We think this will profoundly modify the way we share and work together by letting people create live dashboards of documents instead of jumping from one shared document to another.

How does it work in practice? When you publish a universe and send it to someone, they can then drag any item they want to reuse into their own universes. These items will retain all of their metadata. So when you (the original author) update the public branch, all of the re-used items will be updated everywhere in the Kosmik network.

With this, you can build documents your way, mixing your own content with items saved from public universes. You can work privately, and still be sure that everything in your universe will always be up to date.

Instead of shared canvases or documents you can compose compound documents of public objects you saved over time.

Your Kosmik universes become canvases of live elements. You always know where they come from, where they are re-used and who is the original author (which in turn allows you to have a look at other creations from that person).

Of course a multiplayer document, Figma or Google Docs-style, can be useful and even essential for some workflows. What we want to do is combine the two options (with multiplayer coming later this year) in one product, giving you the freedom to work privately, arrange live content as you please, and still have the option to collaborate in real time.

Expanding publish toward a connected library of human knowledge

The goal of the publish feature is to make all documents readily available, and more importantly, re-usable and re-publishable.

Ted Nelson had two intentions with transclusion. To create a linked library of knowledge, where people could reuse any content at the atomic level, and also allow each transcluded object (with its unique address) to be bought at the time of re-use.

Ted Nelson came up with transclusion with two goals in mind. To create a linked library of knowledge, where people could reuse content at the atomic level, and also to allow transactions of transcluded objects (by giving each a unique address).

Imagine a system where you could pay to re-use only a fragment of an object or piece of content you are interested in. Then if you republish a document that uses that particular fragment, the royalties would be divided between the authors.

We are not there yet but we’ve never been closer! Thank you for supporting us and helping us make this a reality ❤️