smolweb

Spec-faithful Rust implementations of small-web protocols. Each crate is an embeddable library plus, where it makes sense, a CLI. None of them is the reference implementation of its protocol, and none of them speaks for its protocol's author.

Crate	Protocol
misfin	Misfin mail: identities, gemmail, sending client, receive server.
spartan-protocol	Spartan (spartan://): plaintext smolweb with uploads via the =: prompt.
nex-protocol	Nex (nex://): the minimal one — plaintext TCP, no TLS, no status codes.
guppy-protocol	Guppy v0.4.4 (guppy://): smolweb over UDP, with chunking, acks, and retransmission.
gopher-protocol	Gopher (gopher://), Gopher+, and gophers (gophers://, TLS): the elder one. RFC 1436 menus, RFC 4266 URLs, Gopher+ attributes, views, and ASK forms.
finger-protocol	Finger (finger://, RFC 1288) and WebFinger (RFC 7033): the oldest way to ask who someone is, and the one the fediverse uses.
gemini-protocol	Gemini (gemini://), the gemtext grammar, TOFU pinning, and titan (titan://) upload.
kepler-protocol	Kepler (kepler://, keplers://): gemini's shape plus the small web's only cache model.
dict-protocol	DICT (dict://, RFC 2229): networked dictionary lookup. A command loop, not a one-shot fetch.
fsp-protocol	FSP (fsp://): anonymous file transfer over UDP, with its own sequencing and checksums.
scroll-protocol	Scroll (scroll://) and scrolltext: language negotiation, document metadata, UDC classification, abstracts.
text-protocol	Text Protocol (text://): the deliberately minimal one. Three status codes, everything plain text.
scorpion-protocol	Scorpion (scorpion://, scorpions://): the wide one. Four subprotocols, range requests, uploads with conflict detection, and a binary block document format.

All thirteen are MIT licensed, published to crates.io, and usable without anything else in this workspace.

Where a protocol has a successor, it lives in the same crate rather than a new one, because the successors are supersets: a plain RFC 1436 menu is simply a Gopher+ menu without markers. WebFinger is the exception that proves it, being a separate protocol under the same question, so it sits behind its own feature.

Where a crate carries both a wire protocol and the document grammar that protocol defines, both live here, because both are the spec. Grammars are dependency-free and separable: a consumer that only parses can take the crate with default-features = false and pull no async runtime.

Stewardship

These crates hold names that belong, morally, to the protocols' communities rather than to this workspace. misfin in particular is held in stewardship: the crate name transfers to the protocol's author on request, no conditions. The same offer stands for the others.

Where the engines live

This workspace is the wire layer only. The client integration that composes these protocols (errand) and the engine that renders their capsules as documents (nematic) are components of genet, which consumes these crates from crates.io like any other dependency.

History

misfin arrived from its own repository with history intact. The three protocol crates were published from standalone repositories in July 2026, adopted into genet on 2026-07-10, and moved here on 2026-07-23; their commit history for that period lives in genet under components/errand/protocols/.