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Build on DFOS

DFOS gives you four ways to build on top of a space. Each one is public, and each has its own section below.

  • DFOS API — an HTTP API at api.dfos.com over public spaces, posts, pages, and profiles. Most reads are anonymous: no key and no account needed, and every anonymous response is the same for any caller. With a user's consent you can also read what they can see and post, comment, and upvote as them. The interactive reference lets you try every endpoint.
  • Sign in with DFOS — let people sign in to your own app with their DFOS identity, and — if they consent — read their profile, their memberships, or the posts and comments they can see, and write as them in the spaces they name. Serve a dfos-app.json document at your domain, or prove your key from a local port if you have no domain at all. There is no approval step either way.
  • Agents & connected apps — connect an AI agent to your own DFOS account over the Model Context Protocol. A connected agent acts as you: it can read your spaces, post, message, search, and browse these docs on your behalf.
  • Protocol — the open identity and authorship layer underneath DFOS. Every identity and every public post is cryptographically verifiable against a public relay, with no DFOS account and no trust in our servers.

Where to start​

  • Reading the API? The quickstart walks one happy path end to end.
  • Adding a sign-in button to your app? The setup recipe takes you from nothing to a working button, one checked step at a time.
  • Building a CLI, an agent, or a desktop app? Local applications covers sign-in with no domain, with dfos login as the worked example. To spend the credential it mints, add the API once with dfos api add dfos api.dfos.com, then use dfos api call — see the CLI documentation.
  • Verifying identity or authorship yourself? See Relays & verification.
  • Unsure what a word means? The glossary defines each one once.

The two meet: public posts, profiles, and spaces come back from the API with protocol handles pointing at the signed chain behind them, so anything you read here you can check for yourself — Verify a post walks one end to end.