Open Lore NetworkOLN
Network/Journal/Single Apex And The Oln Loredoor Atlas Split
All entries
Entry 025

Single apex domain and the OLN / Loredoor / Atlas split

Date
2026-06-05
Status
Decided
Authority
Creator (infrastructure-level)

Decision

  • One apex. theopenlore.net is the single primary domain for the entire network. The canonical host is the bare apex; www 301-redirects to it.
  • Brand layering — none of these are domains. OLN (Open Lore Network) is the neutral civic-infrastructure layer (Entry 014). Loredoor is the name of the UGC platform/product that sits on it. Atlas is the user-identity surface. All three are served from the one apex.
  • Identity is OLN-level and lives in its own repository, oln-atlas. oln-web (the Network surface) and Loredoor both consume it. This reverses the prior arrangement, in which the profiles table originated in loredoor-app and oln-web bolted a role column onto it (migration 20260427000000_add_profiles_role.sql).
  • data.theopenlore.net is a separate backend service. Its rendered, human-readable pages move under the apex via reverse proxy / rewrite (no code move); data.* becomes internal-only with no public hostname. A public machine-readable API is deferred until there is demand.

This resolves G-031 (domain canonicalization) and supersedes the loredoor.com URL examples in Entry 001.

Reasoning

Authority and AEO consolidation. Entry 001's thesis was that a young platform must consolidate domain authority and entity-graph density on one domain. Splitting across loredoor.com, theopenlore.net, and data.* fragments exactly what is hardest to afford early. One apex accumulates one dense graph.

Neutrality applied to identity. Entry 014 established that the neutral coordination layer must stay distinct from the franchise community on top, with a clean dependency direction. Identity is the most cross-cutting concern there is: a contributor's handle, recognition, and credit history span every franchise. So identity must be the neutral base of the stack, owned by no single community-product. A standalone oln-atlas makes identity the dependency root rather than a table borrowed from one consumer.

Loredoor as product, not domain. Keeping Loredoor a product brand (in UI chrome, never in the URL) preserves the OLN / Loredoor conceptual split while giving users one legible address.

data.* internal. The rendered canonical entity pages are the AEO crown jewels and belong on the apex (see Entry 026). A second indexed host competing with the apex is the fragmentation Entry 001 warns against; the data service stays, but behind the proxy.

Open threads

  • oln-atlas data-ownership migration: who runs the Supabase project, RLS posture, and backfilling existing UUID-keyed profiles.
  • data.* reverse-proxy execution: 301 map, sitemaps, internal-link rewrite.