a private place to write, with an optional anonymous field where a fragment may be read by a stranger without becoming a performance.

how it works

journal

Private, and it stays on your device. Nothing you keep is ever uploaded anywhere. You decide, entry by entry, what to keep and what to let go of.

field

Shared, anonymous, temporary. Let a fragment go and a stranger might read it once — no name attached, no reply, no way to be found by it again. Reading is the only thing that keeps a fragment here: no likes, no follows, nothing ranked. Go a week without being read and it fades. Get read, and the week starts over.

workspace

A private conversation with an AI partner. It knows only what you tell it in that conversation — unless you choose, each time, to let it read your own journal too. When you do, it may notice a word you keep circling across your own entries — named once, plainly, never as a list — and if you want to follow it, walk where that word came from with you: not a lesson, a way of thinking together. It never speaks first, and it never remembers a conversation you didn't choose to keep.

what's kept, what isn't

Journal entries and workspace conversations live only in your browser's own storage. Not synced, not backed up, not seen by us.

A released fragment is stored with its text and when it was born — nothing that says who wrote it. If you release something, a private marker remembers, only in your own browser, which fragments were yours — so you can pull one back into your journal before it fades. That's the only thing it does. It can't list what you've written, edit anything, or follow you anywhere. It expires on its own after seven days, whether you use it or not.

where it comes from

This started from a simpler question than it might look like: what if being read didn't have to mean being known? Most places to write are one or the other — all private, like a notebook nobody sees, or all public, where everything accumulates a shape whether you want it to or not: a follower count, a like count, a history that outlives the moment.

storm.town tries to sit in the gap between those two. Write the unfinished thing. Decide, per fragment, whether it's only for you or whether a stranger might sit with it once. If it goes out, it isn't yours the way a public post usually is — no thread, no name, no way back to it through you. And if nobody reads it, it goes quiet. That's not a punishment. It's closer to what attention actually is: something that has to be given, now, by someone, or it simply isn't there.

The shape underneath is an old one — a root, sitting still, sending out branches nobody plans in advance. A word drifts from where it started the same way attention does: not by force, but by being taken up, again and again, by people who never coordinated with each other. That's the actual thing this project is trying to hold onto, more than any one feature — meaning as something walked toward together, by people who never see each other doing the walking.

still growing

storm.town isn't finished, and isn't trying to look finished. What's live today is the whole of what's described above — nothing here is aspirational. Underneath it, there's real, unbuilt work toward letting the field itself develop a shared shape over time: not a leaderboard, not a feed, nothing that ranks what anyone wrote — closer to a memory of how attention moved, felt rather than displayed. If that ever becomes real, it will arrive the same way everything else here has: quietly, explained plainly the moment it's visible, and never required reading.