A world catalog is an independently maintained collection of world registrations and associated information. A registration service is a separately offered function.
People can choose one catalog, turn to another, or run their own. Cyberplanetary’s catalog does not become the center of the protocol merely because it uses the project’s domain.
One collection is not the whole world
Each operator decides what to include, retain, annotate, investigate, rank, and present. Catalogs can specialize, overlap, and disagree. No shared database, compulsory synchronization, or global approval process is established.
A registration statement can also be published and consumed directly without being recorded in any catalog.
Local policy decides what a catalog keeps or does. The shared specification makes interpretable what its records say.
A listing is not a verdict
Registrant statements remain attributable to their authors. Catalog observations and assessment reports remain separately attributable.
A catalog can retain information about a planned or unavailable world. It can retain input that is incomplete or invalid. Retaining that input does not make its signature valid, its claims true, or its destination available.
Removal from one catalog does not remove another catalog’s record or revoke the world. A human-readable name is not an exclusive protocol-wide allocation.
The freedom machine
The point is not to prescribe a single feed or selection policy. It is to make discovery something people can choose and operate for themselves.
Free, open-source catalog software is part of Cyberplanetary’s mission. The experimental reference catalog accepts signed registrations through its documented HTTP interface. Its publication policy is local to that catalog. Browse the catalog, submit a registration, or run your own.
A catalog listing describes a possible destination. Access to that destination remains subject to its own availability, permissions, and terms.