The Pathway

A pathway is an ordered walk across pages. It began as something else entirely: a saved constellation in a star chart, a way of remembering a route through a federation of wikis. It turned out to already be a bounded-disclosure primitive — it names exactly which pages cross a wire, in what order, to whom.

What it carries

A name, a note, and steps. Each step is a site id and a page slug — never a hostname. That is deliberate: a pathway can travel across the public internet without revealing a single machine name from the farm it came from. The id-to-host table exists only on the keeper’s own machine.

It also carries a digest: a hash over the steps in order. Two people who walk the same pages in the same order composed the same pathway, whatever they each chose to call it.

Five altitudes, one object

The same pathway is a saved walk, a named knowledge package, a scoped access grant, a trust task, and a compression target. Nothing is converted between formats; the object simply means more as it moves.

Where they come from

Drawn by hand in the chart, or suggested by searching the knowledge base — see Suggesting A Pathway. Either way it gets a name, because a knowledge package nobody can refer to is not shareable.