One · Why this exists
The early internet wasn't built to make a business of your attention. It was a place to share, ask questions, and bump into similarly curious folks. It did not matter who you were. What mattered was that you had interests someone else might share.
Carrel is an attempt to return to that. No scraping or AI training. Just curious folks.
Two · How it works
- Your Feed
- Pick the topics you care about and turn each one up or down. Your Feed fills with pages from inside those subjects, mixed with facts, dates and news from the Cards you saved.
- Cards
- Every Card is a real Wikipedia article. There is one Card per subject, so everyone interested in it ends up in the same place. Save a Card to keep it.
- Decks
- A Deck is a collection of Cards with its own posts and chat. Keepers build them and Members join them. Once a Deck has six Cards and a post, anyone can read it at its own address.
- Posts
- Posts open with the subject and up to five pictures. Replies nest underneath, and you can mention another member by name.
- Community
- See who else is here, follow them, and open anyone's page from their name.
- Lab
- Experiments with your Cards: a Mind Map, Connections between subjects, a Timeline, and a Magazine maker that turns a Deck into a printable booklet.
Three · The ladder
Standing is earned inside a Card, and each rung unlocks something real. These are the exact thresholds the software enforces.
- 0VisitorRead, start threads, reply, vote and invite people.
- 25ContributorYour name carries some weight here.
- 150ArchivistYour votes count double. Your flags go straight to the mod queue.
- 400StewardEligible for mod, on confirmation by an existing mod.
- 1000CuratorConfirm new Stewards into mod roles.
Anyone can start a thread, reply, vote and invite from the first day. Standing is earned per Card and nowhere else. It decays 1.5% a week if you stop showing up, and self-votes never count.
Four · Who brought you
Every account records who invited it and when. On your profile you can see the person who let you in, and everyone you have let in since, with their join date and how they are actually doing. The quality of your invitations is visible to you.
If a branch turns out to be a bot farm, it is visible and it is traceable. A cluster of signups from one person inside ten minutes looks like exactly what it is. Banning somebody never bans the people underneath them; it raises their branch for review by a person. Membership is a chain of people vouching for people.
Five · What we don't do
- Nothing public except finished Decks you choose to share.
- No API.
- No bulk export.
- No selling the archive as training data.
- No ads.