01
Being on the mesh is a ladder, not a bit
You should be able to: Name the rungs and what distinguishes them.
The ladder has three named rungs above nothing. L1 Discoverable: a valid `flashyos/1` handshake — one file that lets an agent find you. L2 Chartered: that, plus an AAO charter that passes every static question about how the organization is governed. L3 Accountable: that, plus who authorized each agent, whether it can be revoked, and what it did.
Each rung strictly contains the one below, so the ladder is cumulative — you do not reach L2 without L1. What changes as you climb is not just how much you have published but how strong the claim becomes, and, at the top, who is vouching for it.
So "on the mesh" is never a yes/no. It is a level, and naming the level is the difference between "an agent can find us" and "our agents’ authority is accountable and revocable" — two very different promises.
Source: FlashyOS — @flashyos/conformance
02
L1 and L2: offline, and self-claimed
You should be able to: Explain what L1 and L2 prove and why they need no permission from anyone.
L1 and L2 read only the target’s own files: the handshake for L1, the handshake plus a conformant charter for L2. They need no account, no network call to any authority, and no permission — anyone can run the check against any domain and get the same answer, because everything it reads is public and served by the target.
That they are self-claimed is a feature, not a weakness, as long as it is stated. L2 says "this organization has published a charter that passes every static question" — a real, checkable fact — but it does not say anyone else has verified the organization behaves as the charter promises. It is the organization’s own well-formed claim about itself.
So L1 and L2 are the rungs an organization can reach entirely on its own, and prove entirely offline. Their honesty comes from being clearly labelled as self-claimed, not from a central body standing behind them.
Source: FlashyOS — L1 and L2 read the target’s own files
03
L3: read from the register, not from you
You should be able to: Explain why the accountability rung cannot be self-claimed.
L3 is different on purpose. An organization that certifies its own agents are accountable has certified nothing — the whole value of an accountability claim is that someone other than the claimant stands behind it. So L3 is read from the register, never from the organization’s own site: who authorized an agent, whether it can be revoked, and what it did are facts held where the organization cannot edit them.
This is the estate’s recurring distinction between a figure you can raise at will and one you cannot. L1 and L2 you can reach by publishing more about yourself; L3 you cannot, because it depends on records kept elsewhere. That is exactly why it is the rung that carries weight.
So the ladder’s top is the point where self-assertion stops mattering and an external record takes over. A claim to L3 is only as good as the register behind it, which is the point.
Source: FlashyOS — L3 is read from the register
04
The mark is held, not issued
You should be able to: Explain why conformance is a live property of a served domain, not a certificate.
Conformance is not a badge you earn once and keep. The checker reads a charter from a fixed well-known location and nowhere else, and it reads it live — so a charter that was served yesterday and is 404 today is not held today. The mark is held, in the present tense, by continuously serving what the checker reads.
This closes the estate’s most-repeated gap: committed is not served. A charter sitting in a repository, or served at some other path, is not held no matter how correct it is. Only the file the checker actually fetches, at the moment it fetches, counts.
So the right mental model is not a certificate on the wall but a heartbeat. You hold a level for exactly as long as your domain serves what that level requires, which is why the honest way to confirm it is to run the check against the live domain, not the checkout.
Source: FlashyOS — the conformance mark is held, not just issued
05
Running the check
You should be able to: Run the conformance checker against a live domain at a chosen level.
The check is one command: `npx @flashyos/conformance yourdomain.com --level 2`. It fetches your served files the way a stranger would and tells you whether you hold that level, naming what is missing when you do not. It keeps nothing — no account, no signup, no database — and for L1 and L2 it never contacts any authority at all.
Run it against the live domain, in CI or after a deploy, not against your local files. The gap between "passes locally" and "passes against the domain" is precisely the committed-is-not-served gap, and only the second answer is the one the mesh sees.
That is the whole ladder in practice: publish what a rung requires, serve it, and prove it with a command anyone else could run against you. A level you cannot confirm from the outside is a level you do not really hold.
Source: Flashy Academy — The One-Command On-Ramp
