youcannoteat.codes · The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

The town, not the platform.

This page owns nothing. It is a lens. Enter a town and it reads that town's public record straight off the open network, live, the same relays anyone else can read, and renders what it actually finds. No backend, no account, no owner. A town goes live the moment it has signed civic records tagged with its name. The book anchors in one such town: Goshen, Connecticut.

The slug is built the same way every tool in the family builds it, so the query matches.

The Directory

Known towns. Be the second.

Most of these have zero records today. That is not a failure. That is the invitation: the first signed record from your town puts it on the open network, and this page starts reading it. The mechanic is the whole point, a town goes live from the outside in.

How the Lens Works

One tag. One query. A whole town.

Every civic record in the family carries a town tag, t=town-<state>-<name>. That single tag is what makes "the town, not the platform" a real query: one #t filter against any open relay returns a whole town's public record, no matter which tool signed it or which platform it passed through. This page runs that query in your browser and verifies every signature it gets back before it shows you anything.

Print · pamphlet ⟶ Nostr The Record Sign a public record, a minute, a notice, a witness, and broadcast it to the open network tagged with your town. That is how a town first appears here. github.com/michaelditter/the-record ↗ Oath · commitment ⟶ Ostrom charter The Charter Write a commons that governs itself on Ostrom's eight principles, then sign it. A charter tagged with your town shows in its dossier below. github.com/michaelditter/the-charter ↗

Honest framing: a record is durable, not eternal. It lives as long as one relay keeps a copy. A charter is a replaceable event, so its keyholder can publish a new version, which is why each version links its immutable nevent for verification.