A box to rant into
`draft_post` hands back the record; a human hits Post.
Writing to a repo needs the author's OAuth grant, and that grant lives in the author's browser, which is where it should stay.
It cannot publish.
An agent can list posts, read them, render markdown, run predicates over arbitrary prose, and build the exact record that publishing would write.
There is an MCP endpoint at `/mcp`, an index at `/llms.txt`, the full corpus at `/llms-full.txt`, and JSON at `/api/*`.
For the agents
There is no hand-written JavaScript in this site, except the shared OAuth client every site here uses, which would be a bad thing to reimplement.
The browser side is Rust compiled to WebAssembly.
The Worker is Rust compiled to WebAssembly.
It is also fast enough to re-render the entire preview on every keystroke in the composer, which means the preview *is* the renderer, not an approximation of it that disagrees with the real one at the worst moment.
That is fast enough to render every request at the edge with no cache so a post is live the instant the record lands, and there is no invalidation to get wrong.
The individual stages are in the tens of microseconds; markdown rendering is the expensive one at around 100.
Parsing this post, tokenising it and rendering it to HTML costs about 240 microseconds end to end a quarter of a millisecond, measured, in `rant/crates/rant-core/tests/budget.rs`, which fails the build if it regresses.
Because the whole design leans on one number.
Why Rust
And they are server-rendered, so a view is a link you can send someone, and it works with JavaScript off.
They compose: `?view=rare+bionic`.
- `?view=bionic`, `?view=rsvp`, `?view=crawl` the reading modes from [read.mino.mobi](https://read.mino.mobi), which is where the idea came from.
Reading an argument backwards from its conclusion strips the momentum that hides a bad step.
- `?view=reverse` last sentence first.
- `?view=emotion&emotion=fear` one emotion at a time.
- `?view=sentiment` the words a valence lexicon rates, signed.
Different answer.
- `?view=rare` weighted by rarity in English instead.
The once-only words burn; the fifteenth "however" is nearly invisible.
- `?view=hapax` weighted by rarity in this post.
It disagrees with cadence often.
- `?view=grade` the same bars for difficulty.
One bar per sentence, by length.
- `?view=cadence` not the words: the shape.
They are in the URL:
Every post has views.
Weird ways to read
The posts on this front page are just the ones that happen to be text files in the repo.
Your posts go to your repo and read back at `/read/<your-handle>/`.
Sign in with your own handle, hit [/setup/](/setup/) once to create your publication record, and write.
There is nothing owner-only about this.
Anyone can use it
A frontend that can only *add* to your repo is not really handing you your data.
Everything this site has ever written to your repo is listed at [/mine/](/mine/), with a delete button on each row: your posts, your publication record, your subscriptions, your recommends.
The recommend button on each post works the same way `site.standard.graph.recommend`, in your repo, pointing at the document.
Unsubscribing is deleting your own record, which is the correct amount of power for a reader to hold over their own subscriptions so the button is a toggle, and pressing it again deletes the record.
There is no list of you.
Nothing lands in a database here.
Subscribing writes a `site.standard.graph.subscription` to **your** repo, pointing at this publication.
The subscribe button is a record too
The raw markdown rides along inside the record's `content` union as an `at.markpub.markdown` member, so the *source* is portable too, not just a rendering of it.
If this site vanishes tomorrow, your posts do not.
A different reader can render it.
An indexer that has never heard of this domain can read it.
It is a [standard.site](https://standard.site) record: a shared lexicon that several independent long-form projects agreed on, precisely so that a post is not hostage to the site it was typed into.
That record is not a Rant-shaped thing.
A post here is a `site.standard.document` record in your ATProto personal data server the same place your Bluesky posts live, under your own DID, portable to any other host that speaks the protocol.
Your own repo.
Where "somewhere real" is
You type into it, you hit post, and the words go somewhere real.
So: a box.
The ones that die are the ones that need about four minutes and a plain box, and instead get offered a content management system.
Not the good ones the good ones survive being written down badly.
There is a specific kind of thought that dies in the gap between having it and finding somewhere to put it.