The introduction is the product

Two stacked open standards

Layer 1: the profile. A profile is whatever a person publishes at a URL: a Notion page, a Google Doc, a Carrd site, a personal website, a plain HTML file. The protocol reads it. IndieWeb microformats (h-card) are the baseline schema; an AI parser fills in whatever the page does not mark up. The output is a structured JSON document any Kindling implementation can read. Profiles live where their owners host them. Kindling stores nothing.

Layer 2: the Pool. A Pool is a curated list of profile URLs organized by context: a city, a scene, an interest, a relationship orientation, a healing community. Pools are hosted as JSON in a public Git repository or behind a Pool API. A Pool declares its curator, its charter, its intent, its visibility (public, unlisted, or invite-only), and its consent rules.

Consent is opt-in, by handshake. A profile is added to a Pool only when the owner accepts. The handshake travels as structured email under the hood, inheriting decades of mature spam filtering. Identity is layered: email verification is the baseline; OAuth via existing providers is a familiar shortcut; curator vouching works inside tight Pools where universal verification would be overkill.

Discovery is decentralized. Pool URLs travel socially. Pools self-publish to a .well-known/kindling-pool file so any crawler can find them. Kindling runs a public registry of opt-in Pools; anyone can run their own. Spam filtering works in three layers: identity-based gating, per-profile preferences, and shared block lists.

The specification is the product

Publishing the protocol before publishing a consumer product is a commitment in public. If TranquilTech disappeared tomorrow, Pools would keep working. Profiles would keep being readable. Other implementations would keep running.

That property is hard to manufacture later. It has to be designed in from the start. A closed-source matchmaking app asking people to trust it has no leverage. A published specification that anyone can audit, fork, and re-implement has a different kind of standing in the conversation.

The dual license (Apache 2.0 for code, CC BY 4.0 for the spec text) ensures that no single company, including TranquilTech, can own the standard.

Where things stand

Framework v0.1 is in pre-launch review, targeting public release as v0.1.1 in late spring 2026. The spec is frozen for v0.1.1: changes during the review window are patch-level fixes only.

The Mycelial reference implementation ships late summer 2026 at kindling.mycelial.help.

Mycelial as the first home

The first Kindling reference implementation lives inside Mycelial at kindling.mycelial.help, when Mycelial v1 ships. Inside Mycelial, Pools become the way Grove inhabitants find each other within and across Groves. A Grove hosts its own Pools: a "looking for a coffee buddy" Pool, a "dating-open in this Grove" Pool, an "available to mentor on integration work" Pool. Pools also span Groves through the Mycelial Network.

The Mycelial implementation is the first real test of the protocol against a live community. The patterns it surfaces feed back into the spec. By design, it is the first implementation, and far from the only one we want to see.

If you build one, tell us. We will list it.