WHAT IS THIS?

Northern Atlas is a discovery tool for the indie / small web, built natively on Nostr. The core experience is Wander — one button, one good site, repeat. No feed, no algorithm tuned to keep you scrolling: just a way back into the strange, hand-made, non-commercial web.

Everything below is how it actually works under the hood — the review that decides what gets in, how you find things, how the catalogue keeps itself healthy, and how every part of it lives on open infrastructure you can leave with.

HOW A SITE GETS CHARTED

Anyone signed in can submit a URL. Quality is filtered at the door, once, so that everything in the catalogue is worth stumbling onto. Each submission runs through the same pipeline:

• Fetch & strip. We retrieve the page and reduce it to its readable text and a count of third-party trackers/ad scripts.
• Read it. Claude reads the stripped page and returns a verdict, a category, tags, a short description, and three 0–10 scores: enshittification (how degraded/commercialised it feels), AI-slop (mass-produced filler), and ad density.
• Decide. A submission is charted only if the verdict is approve, all three scores are below 4, and it carries fewer than 8 trackers. A clear reject is turned away; anything in between is held for a human to review — never auto-published on a maybe.

The bar is deliberately about character, not popularity: a lovingly maintained personal site with ten readers is exactly what belongs here.

HOW YOU FIND THINGS

• Wander is genuinely random. It draws a uniformly-random active site — there is no engagement weighting, no “trending,” no personalisation. The only filter is showability (see below), so you never land on something broken or flagged.
• Path walks from one site to a related one on demand. Relatedness is computed transparently: shared tags count most, then category, then shared outbound links, with a light nudge from quality. It’s a deterministic similarity score, not a black box — and it stops rather than pad the trail with weak matches.
• The Map places every charted site on one permanent, procedurally-generated world. Sites that share tags settle into the same neighbourhoods; each site has a fixed coordinate — the same one shown as its chart reference on its dossier — so the reference, the card’s little topographic tile (an actual crop of the world at that spot), and the map are all the same coordinate system. Most of the world is uncharted frontier it fills into over time.
• Charted is the plain browsable index, and Next bearings on each dossier shows the nearest related sites.

HOW THE CATALOGUE STAYS HEALTHY

A handful of scheduled jobs keep the map honest without any human in the loop:

• Liveness. Sites are HTTP-checked on rotation; after 7 straight failures a site is marked dead and drops out of Wander, and it auto-recovers the moment it responds again.
• Showability. Time-decayed flags and 👍/👎 reactions are folded into a score that quietly hides sites that have gone bad — without ever ranking the good ones against each other.
• Re-analysis. Sites are periodically re-read (those slipping in quality first). If the page hasn’t materially changed we skip the model entirely; if it has, it’s re-scored against the same bar.
• Engagement ingest. Reactions and favourites are pulled back in from the relays hourly, so the signal is reconciled from the open network, not just our own database.
• Scouting. A gentle crawler follows what charted sites link out to (robots-permitting), and a few times a day runs the strongest of those candidates through the same review above — charting the ones that clear the bar automatically, while borderline finds still wait for a human. So the catalogue grows on its own, along the grain of the web it already loves, without ever lowering the bar.

HOW IT’S BUILT ON NOSTR

On Nostr your identity is a cryptographic key you own — not an account on someone’s server. Northern Atlas uses it as the identity layer and the source of truth, not just a login:

• You sign in with your own key. Use a browser extension (Alby, nos2x), a signer app by QR or tap (Primal, Amber, nsec.app), or paste a key as a last resort. No account, no password, no email; with an extension or signer your secret key never leaves it. Your npub is your identity here and in every other Nostr app.
• Everything you do is a signed event on public relays. Submitting a site, saving a favourite (⭐), and reacting (👍/👎/🚩) each create a small event signed by you and published to open relays — nos.lol, relay.damus.io, relay.primal.net and relay.nostr.band — so your actions live on Nostr under your npub, not locked in our database.
• The catalogue itself lives on Nostr. Every charted site — its address, title, description, category and tags — is a public bookmark event (kind 30003) anyone can read or rebuild. Our database is a fast cache of that open index plus our own review history and settings; the catalogue could be reconstructed from the relays alone.
• So your data is portable. Your submissions and favourites are yours, readable by any Nostr client. You can leave and take them with you — there is no lock-in.

YOUR KEYS ARE SAFE

If you bring your own Nostr key, Northern Atlas only ever asks your signer to sign the events you explicitly trigger: bookmark events (kind 30003, for submissions and favourites) and reactions (kind 7). It will never touch the rest of your identity — no profile edits, no changing who you follow, no relay-list changes, no DMs. Every event we can sign on your behalf is listed in our open security policy.

SUPPORT & VALUE-FOR-VALUE

• Zaps go straight to the creators. When you ⚡ a site, the sats go directly to that operator’s Lightning wallet, tagged to the site. Northern Atlas never holds funds, never runs a wallet, never takes a cut.
• Recognition is for supporting the Atlas itself. Sats sent to the project accrue to your npub as a lifetime total and earn a standing — Wanderer → Pathfinder → Cartographer → Surveyor → Polestar → Founder. It’s cumulative, never a subscription, and unlocks nothing paywalled — every feature is free to everyone. Being publicly named on the honour roll is strictly opt-in.
• The Atlas has a Nostr identity too. It verifies via NIP-05, posts a small daily digest, and is followable like any other account.

WHAT WE WON’T DO

• No algorithm. Discovery is random or relatedness-driven — never engagement-optimised.
• No ads, no dark patterns. Quality is filtered at submission time, not sold.
• No paywalls. Every feature is free to everyone.
• No custody. We never hold funds or run wallets.
• No surveillance. No third-party analytics, no tracking, no profiles built on you.
• No lock-in. You own your keys and your data; the index is open infrastructure.