One · Why this exists
The early internet wasn't built to make a business of your attention, or to feed your knowledge and data to algorithms. It was a space to share, discuss, ask questions, and bump into like-minded and similarly curious folks. The utopian aspect was real for a time. It did not matter who you were, where you lived, or what you believed; all that mattered was that you had an opinion and interests someone else might share.
Carrel is an attempt to return to that moment. In the years since, everything became a business, and we lived online in atomic silos of bot-curated media.
Search for a subject. Start a conversation. Invite others to join. If it works, we will grow a community outside the walled gardens of Meta, TikTok, and Google.
Two · How it works
Channels are not invented. Each one is claimed from Wikipedia, so the namespace is real and deduplicated. There is exactly one Kingdom of Kongo, and everyone interested in it ends up in the same room.
Every thread opens with an artifact from the public record: the article, its extract, its image, a link back to the source. The discussion happens underneath it. The subject is fixed before the first word of opinion is written.
Three · The ladder
Standing is earned inside a channel, and each rung unlocks something real. These are the exact thresholds the software enforces.
- 0VisitorRead, reply and upvote. Your first contribution is a reply.
- 25ContributorStart threads. Invite people to this channel.
- 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.
Nobody arrives and starts broadcasting: your first contribution in any channel has to be a reply to somebody. After that, standing is earned per channel and nowhere else. It decays 1.5% a week if you stop showing up, votes from accounts less than three days old count nothing, self-votes never count, and no more than 60 points can be earned in a channel in a day, and only your first 10 comments and 3 threads earn at all. Volume alone gets you nowhere.
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
- No public pages.
- No search engine indexing.
- No API.
- No bulk export.
- No selling the archive as training data.
- No ads.