Words I found I needed while reading the Habitat sources with a modern question in mind: what happens to a massively multiplayer community when it is federated across many operators and when some of its inhabitants are driven by language models.
No system is being built. This is not a specification and not a plan. It is a set of distinctions that the Habitat sources make necessary but do not themselves supply, recorded because reasoning about the problem is impossible without them. Everything here is provisional, unlike the historical Habitat glossary, which is fixed.
Inhabitant: Anything that acts within the world. The supertype; almost never the right word on its own, because the whole design turns on which kind you mean.
Avatar: An inhabitant driven by a human being. Derived from Habitat's term and deliberately narrowed to it: an Avatar has stakes — something it can lose that it cares about losing. Only Avatars accumulate, vote, and hold standing. Avoid: using "avatar" for an LLM-driven figure, however humanlike it appears.
Familiar: An LLM-driven inhabitant bound to a human principal, acting on their behalf and at their expense. Visibly marked as non-human. Cannot accumulate, vote, or hold standing of its own; whatever it does accrues to its principal, who is accountable for it.
Fixture: An LLM-driven inhabitant bound to a place rather than to a person — a shopkeeper, a guide, a barkeep. Has no principal beyond the server operator who runs it, and therefore no standing anywhere else in the federation.
Principal: The human accountable for a Familiar. Every Familiar has exactly one. A Familiar with no reachable principal is not permitted to act.
Stake: Something an inhabitant can lose and would rather not. The property that separates Avatars from Familiars and Fixtures, and the reason the latter two are excluded from accumulation and governance.
Instance: One independently operated server, with its own operator, rules, and population. The unit of governance and the unit of failure. Avoid: "shard" (implies one operator splitting for scale, which is the thing this system specifically is not) and "region" (means something much smaller and more specific in the Habitat sources).
Federation: The set of Instances that have agreed to carry each other's inhabitants and traffic. Not a single authority; membership is bilateral and revocable.