Syzygy is the home of many configuration settings and voiced preferences for things like notifications, feeds, recommendations, search, and delegation.

Notifications

In bivouac, a group may have roles that have certain duties, or are the only ones who can perform a certain action. These users need to be notified to perform the manual decisions in a timely manner. This is done when their editor emails them (no other nodes on the network know their email address).

Perhaps you want to turn on notifications for any time a friend posts. Or mute a noisy discussion.

An important role in bivouac is being someone's Nameserver. You probably should allow emails whenever their records change, so you can quickly confirm with them out of band and update your record.

Feeds

Bivouac feeds are sortable and configurable. For example, a user might choose to use Reddit's sorting algorithm (the wilson score interval), or they might prefer chronological, or something else.

They might also set muted topics or users.

Delegation

Syzygy defines "autopilot" actions one should take if a user does not manually cast their vote for a decision.

You could, for example, delegate climate decisions to your favorite science curator.

Groups may decide that for certain votes this "zombie" voting should not take place. Or they could decide that the vote should decay by some factor (like 1/n'th of a vote).

If delegation was disallowed or failed to happen (because your delegate didn't choose), you'll get notified before your time is up to vote. You could also choose to get notified of what they picked and approve it.

Recommendations

Syzygy hopes to walk a balance you define to show you deviant/dissenting stuff in ways that respect your boundaries. Many of the tools here could be used to create some serious filter bubbles, that's not necessarily all bad, but it's something you should be able to configure. An example would be similar-topic recommendations.

Recommendations are something that all four of you have to opt in to:

• the author of document A
• the author of document B
• the friend who linked both A and B
• you, the person receiving the recommendation

Recomendations can be simple "find a subreddit" style 'people in X are often in Y', matrix multiplication recommendations. Ideally they should focus on content, not on the person doing the search.

Search

Bivouac search is implemented via static site indexes (there are two implementations we know of, one is used by mdbook, elasticlunr).

The search index should be encrypted to the same Crew audience. During a search, bivouac will draw from all the indexes that you're a member of.

If someone's content is pending moderation, the mods might downrank or remove it from the search indexes temporarily.

Discoverability

Syzygy documents define how discoverable you want to be. For example, maybe you don't want to be publicly listed as a member of a group, or publicly listed on a friends' list of petnames. Or maybe whether you want to appear in search.

Authors of documents also define under what conditions their document is placed in the static search index files.

View From Nowhere

When viewing the wiki in the editor, one can have an enriched ability to view the documents from another person's point of view (provided enough of their preference documents and rules are public). Or, they can view the space of all wikis across the wiki-verse from a "view from nowhere", e.g. viewing all things claiming to be the authority on "Idaho" in a serendipitous exploration of content.