📖What it means

The collection of projects that share one underlying build pipeline — one whole installation of the platform. The dominion the estate runs in today is EDEN.

WHERE IT SITS: client -> accounts -> DOMINIONS -> projects. A client may hold several accounts; an account may hold one or more dominions; every project belongs to exactly one dominion; and a dominion has exactly one client, reached through its account.

A dominion is a COPY, not a shared deployment — Ninad's words: like an installation of Windows on a separate machine. It carries its own copy of everything: records, money, budgets, access, agents and projects. From the moment it is forked it evolves independently. Each dominion holds a Carolverse-type BASE PROJECT whose name, its services and its agent names may all differ from the dominion it was copied from. Agent names are unique WITHIN a dominion, never across dominions.

A dominion is VERSIONED, so a specific recorded version can be forked into a new dominion that then goes its own way. Every ancestor up the chain records each descendant, so Eden holds a row for every dominion ever descended from it — including those forked from its own forks. Copying a project into another dominion creates a SEPARATE project, which may later be renamed.

One dominion never shares a VM with another.

A DOMINION SPANS A BUNCH OF MACHINES. Every project runs on its OWN machine, so the host recorded on a dominion is its BASE project's machine and each further project adds one. What survives from the original 'one dominion per machine' wording is that NO MACHINE IS EVER SHARED — not between two dominions, and not between two projects.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Realm", "distinction": "A realm is Carolverse world geography \u2014 a tier above cities. A dominion is a real installation of the platform with its own pipeline. Unrelated; the word was considered for this concept and rejected because it was already taken."}, {"term": "Realm of control", "distinction": "What one agent may act on, worked out live from the records. A dominion is not an authority boundary at all \u2014 it is which installation you are in."}, {"term": "Project", "distinction": "A project sits INSIDE a dominion and is the unit that subscribes to services. A dominion holds many projects; a project belongs to exactly one dominion."}, {"term": "Account", "distinction": "A dominion folds into an account, and the account into a client. Payment happens at the account level, never at the dominion level."}, {"term": "Service instance", "distinction": "A service's dedicated per-project deployment of ONE SHARED codebase, at a pinned version, never forked (design 557). A dominion is the opposite shape: a full copy that evolves independently. Same intuition, opposite rule."}, {"term": "User instance", "distinction": "One person's own identity within one project \u2014 a human with seven projects holds seven. Nothing to do with which installation they are in."}, {"term": "Oratorium", "distinction": "Oratorium is the platform as a thing; a dominion is one running installation of it. Eden is a dominion, Oratorium is what Eden is an installation of."}, {"term": "Carolverse", "distinction": "Carolverse is the business, and it is Eden's BASE PROJECT. Another dominion has its own base project, which may carry a different name entirely."}]

📖Nuance

Ninad proposed 'Instance' and then 'Realm' before settling on Dominion, and both were refused for the same reason: the estate already uses those words. 'Instance' means a person's own identity within one project, and a service's dedicated per-project deployment. 'Realm' means the tier of the Carolverse world above cities, and an agent's realm of control — about 150 uses in code. Dominion was chosen from the candidates that had no dictionary entry and no code use at all.

The trap worth naming: the service-instantiation ruling says ONE SHARED CODEBASE, NEVER FORKED. That governs services WITHIN a dominion. A dominion is itself a fork by design, and collapsing the two would 'fix' away the independent evolution that is the whole point.

📖Also called

- platform installation
- pipeline instance

📖Filed under

Category: entity.

Service: Governance.