Frequently asked questions

A free library of exhaustive, step-by-step guides for doing things, from building a transistor to building the machines made of them. Every guide fits into a hierarchy where each level builds only on the ones below, so a total beginner can climb from knowing nothing to the frontier of a subject without gaps. It runs as a desktop app with no servers, so it cannot be shut down, paywalled, or made to watch you.

Wikipedia teaches you about things; Academy Network teaches you to do them. WikiHow does teach doing, but stops at simple tasks. Khan Academy is uneven and relies on a handful of staff. Here, anyone with the knowledge can contribute, one definitive guide per topic, all reviewed by knowledgeable volunteers and all fitted into a single structured ladder. See the overview.

AI is prompt-dependent, capped in length, prone to confident wrong answers, and limited to what its makers allow. A guide here is written by someone who has actually done the thing, reviewed by others who know the subject, exhaustive rather than summarized, and permanent. It does not change its answer based on how you phrased the question.

An app. A website has a server, and a server has an owner, a bill, and an off switch. An app that carries the library with it has none of those, and it keeps working on a laptop with no internet at all once synced. This site is only where you download it.

The design is finished and the foundation is built: the protocol is fully specified, the core library that implements it is written and tested, and the project's self-hosted forge is live with community-governed merging. The networking layer and the desktop app are being built next, so there is nothing to download yet.

No. There is no sign-up, no email, no password. On first launch the app quietly creates a key on your machine that is your pseudonymous identity. You never see crypto unless you go looking for it.

Yes, fully, once synced. All guide text is replicated to your machine, so reading is instant and needs no connection. This is deliberate: it is exactly the people with unreliable or censored internet who most need universal education.

No. Nodes reach each other only as Tor onion services, so your address is never exposed. And because you already hold a full copy of the text, reading sends no request at all. There is simply nothing to log. See Privacy.

No. Tor and keys are invisible plumbing. You download the app, open it, and start reading. There is nothing to configure.

Human translations are first-class: a guide in another language links to the original, never a fork. Where one does not exist yet, the app can machine-translate any guide on your own machine: small translation models are fetched from peers like any other media and work offline, no cloud service is ever called, and the output is clearly labeled as unreviewed. Machine text never becomes a published guide; only a human translation that passes review does.

Yes. Alongside guides, the app has a Media section for standalone uploads: books, videos, audio, images, or any file. A large upload is split into pieces that spread across many machines, so no single node holds the whole thing, and identical files are stored only once across the whole network. Like everything else on the network, an upload can be taken down by a community removal vote, so only share what you have the right to share.

Anyone who knows how to do something and takes the time to teach it. Contributing happens inside the app under a pseudonym; there is no staff and no fee. See Contributing.

A randomly drawn jury of verifiers, people certified by their peers as knowing the subject, votes on each submission within a time window, and every vote must include written reasoning back to the author. Majority approves; anything less returns with feedback. No single person decides.

The community is in charge. Editors keep the index tidy but are bound delegates: they cannot censor a passed guide, stack the jury, or block a removal, and a community no-confidence vote can replace them entirely. Votes are weighted by earned standing, so no one can fake consensus with throwaway accounts. The whole design is on the Governance page.

You become a verifier by certification: current verifiers in a subject vouch for you, and once enough have, you are seated. Editors are drawn from long-standing verifiers. Both are earned by a pseudonym, and both are recallable. See Becoming a verifier.

Improve it (your edit goes through the same review), flag it on its talk page, or, for something that should not exist at all, open a community removal vote. Removals are standing-weighted and need a supermajority. See Removing guides.

You can delete your own standalone uploads yourself, at any time, with no vote. Published guide history is permanent by design, but the community can vote to remove content that should not exist at all. Nobody else can quietly change or delete your work: edits by others go through the same open review, and removals are a public, standing-weighted vote. See Removing guides.

There are no ads, anywhere, ever. The protocol has no ad mechanism and no tracking, so there is nothing to sell. Because there are no servers, it costs almost nothing to run, so it does not need ad revenue. It is free because charging would defeat the point: universal education is the name.

The one place money touches a guide. Whoever originally wrote a guide (its duke) may add a single donate button at the bottom, pointing at their own donation page. Readers can use it or ignore it, the duke can delete it, and none of it goes to the network. It is the only thing on a guide that leaves the network, so the app warns before opening it.

The network is for teaching real skills, openly, and editorial review exists precisely so the index is knowledge, not a dumping ground. Anonymity protects readers and contributors, the same reason libraries do not publish lending records. Nothing here is legal advice; the full terms and the split of responsibility are on the Legal page.

No single party can. There is no server to seize and no company to pressure; the library lives on every reader's machine and peers find each other over Tor. The more people read a thing, the more copies exist. The knowledge is also exportable to plain files with one click, so it survives even the death of the software.

That is the point of it, and it is designed for exactly this. Where the Tor network is blocked, the app connects through bridges and disguised pluggable transports (Snowflake, obfs4, meek), trying a direct connection first and falling back on its own with no setup. The key is that you only need to get through once: because every node holds the whole library and reading is fully offline, one successful sync puts the knowledge on your device permanently, with nothing left to block. And since the app is small, signed, and freely shareable, one person who gets through can pass both the app and the library to others offline. It is an arms race and no tool is perfect, but reading stays unobservable and offline, and knowledge that reaches a country cannot be pulled back out. See the network page.

No. Just by running, your app is a node: it holds guides and serves them to others over Tor. Closing the window does not stop it; the app hides to the system tray and keeps sharing quietly in the background, and it can start with your computer so your node is there without your having to open it. Both are on by default and switchable in settings, and quitting from the tray icon stops it fully. A hidden window does no work beyond the node itself, so the cost is tiny.

Run a seed node: an always-on node on a cheap VPS or a small home server, set up by one reviewable script; see Get involved. Once it connects, the network finds and uses it automatically, no registration needed. Know that a node stores and serves a full copy of the corpus, so check your host's terms and your local law first (Legal).

A slice of disk you choose to donate and a little bandwidth, both capped by you. Nobody is paid to run this, and nothing needs a subscription, so the network costs almost nothing to keep alive.

Nothing stops. The protocol is openly specified and reimplementable by anyone, the code is open source, editor keys rotate and can be re-seated by the community, seed addresses spread peer-to-peer, and the corpus is exportable. The network is built to outlive its founders, its seeds, and this website by design.