From d0c7981b3f0034051e5336ae3f20f5dd622d0989 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Meta Vens Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2026 03:37:56 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Record the operator's CultMesh product direction beside the witness research Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 --- .../prior-art-2026-10-26.md | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) diff --git a/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md b/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md index dd547b38..77e0810e 100644 --- a/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md +++ b/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md @@ -294,3 +294,9 @@ The implemented path is a weighted plurality over self-asserted, unsigned claim - a determinism contract across runtimes Its demonstration case is a cheating client being caught and corrected by witnesses. + +## Product direction (operator, 2026-10-27, verbatim) + +"the value is in solving the multiplayer scaling problem for indie developers in an ergonomic fashion. Having one authoritative server is fine, up to a point, but there's no real open source playbook on how to ship an MMO, and existing solutions like SpacetimeDB have a huge ergonomics gap. I want CultMesh to feel like magic: as a garden path, you annotate your domain POCOs and simulation code and declare your authority structure (I see no reason why we couldn't support server-authoritative and trusted co-op as a configurable subset of the much harder problem we're aiming at, feel free to correct me if that's a silly notion), and it'll all just work without the developer needing to understand networking deeply." + +Witness authority is therefore one authority policy inside a garden-path framework, not the product. The ergonomics prior-art pass is `research/cultmesh-garden-path/`.