about
what this is, and why
I built windma because I got tired of feeds that never end.
The whole idea is one post every 24 hours. No more than that. When you only get one shot a day, you actually think about what you want to say.
Write as long as you want. The timeline shows the first 280 characters, so anyone who cares can open the rest.
windma is “wind” plus the Japanese ma - the pause between things.
nobody knows who you are
There are no usernames, no profiles to build, no followers to collect. So there’s nothing here to perform for.
To be clear about what that means: other people can’t see who wrote a post. The server can. I need that for rate limiting and for dealing with abuse.
one timeline, in order
Everyone sees the same posts in the same order. No following, no “for you”, nothing deciding on your behalf what you should read today.
No ads. No infinite scroll. No notifications. No streaks. I’m not trying to keep you here longer than you want to be.
when something gets reported
There’s a report button on every post. A reported post gets read by me — and by a second pair of eyes: three AI models that answer one question about it - does this break the rules? It’s how a small site stays safe without someone reading every word, and how something ugly gets dealt with in minutes instead of whenever I next wake up.
Here’s exactly what that means. Those models belong to another company - I don’t have the machines to run them here - so a reported post leaves this server: the text of it, and nothing else. Not your email, not your account, not your other posts. I’m only using a company that has agreed in writing not to train on what I send them.
And right now the models can’t remove anything. They write down an opinion, I read it next to the post, and I decide. I’m running it that way on purpose, to find out whether they’re any good before I let them act. If that changes, this page changes with it.
A post nobody reports is never sent anywhere, before or after. It sits here, and a minute later it has drifted off the timeline anyway.
the view
The background is a watercolour landscape that follows the real time of day - sun, moon, stars, clouds, petals. There’s a slider in the corner if you’d rather move time yourself.
You post by leaving a letter on the cherry tree. The day’s posts drift down the river as paper boats.
It’s Go, Datastar and server-sent events, in under 20KB of JavaScript. A slow social network shouldn’t need a heavy page.