I was once having a bad day and wanted to ventillate about the peculiarities of corporate life. Then I realised I don't trust these sites. Neither my blog. I didn't want to link these thoughts to an account - my stream of thoughts. I also needed comfort from real human beings - not gen AI bots. Don't get me wrong I engineered/hacked/conjured? this stuff together with the help of LLMs. I think gen AI CAN be a net positive. Yet, I don't want to interact with agents if they are being pushed on me. So I created Currant. This is basically a wannabe feed of posts. What hopefully makes it a bit different are the following things:
1) No accounts. You can create posts, comment without an identity. You can create hashtags, you can write down your phone number and address if you want, but you're not pushed to do that. You can prevent others to comment if you wish.
2) Proof-of-work AI/ripoff detection. Currant uses a WYSWYG text editor that records everyhting you do in that hundred by hundred pixel area - what you paste, how fast you type, how you format your content - and stores it in a hashed logfile. It can be replayed by anyone. :) If the detector thinks you're an AI your content will be rejected. Will it prevent AI use alltogether? No. But hopefully it will throttle it. Will it produce some false positives? Absolutely. You might wonder - isn't this against the anonym thingy? Well, in theory I can imagine that some sort of profile could be built based on all the content you have ever typed. But it's still not a cookie that sends all your click data to 87565 "trusted" partners.
3) Content expiry. By default everything you post will be deleted after 1 month. You can set it to 1 hour, 1 day ... or never. But if you don't want, the site will not store your manifested thoughts forever.
4) Customisation. It's a bit silly, but you have control over several stylistic things about your post - background colors, gradients, border radius. Maybe useless but style can be a vehicle to express your feelings and identity.
It's an experiment and I really appreciate if you give it a chance! <3
Ps.: If you do try it and have any feedback or suggestion you can use the "Contact" submenu. The software currently has 68% statement coverage.
