How it works

No jargon on this page. If you want the protocol names, the version numbers and the parts an auditor cares about, that's For the nerds. If you just want to know where the buttons are, that's the guide: your tag, posting, boards, crews, talking, moderation, installing it.

This page is the why underneath all of that.

Your tag is made on your device

When you pick a tag, your browser generates a secret number — a cryptographic identity — and stores it locally on that device. It never gets sent to us. There's no moment in the process where a server hands you an account, because there is no account.

That secret is what makes your posts yours. Two things come out of it:

• a secret half that stays in your pocket and is used to put your stamp on things, and
• a public half that everyone can see, which is how the world checks the stamp.

You never have to look at either one. In the app you just see your tag name.

Under a minute

Land on the site → PICK A TAG → type a name → you're posting. No email, no phone, no CAPTCHA, no confirmation link, no terms-of-service wall.

Every post carries your stamp

When you post a flick or drop a comment, your device attaches a mathematical signature to it before it leaves. Anyone — us, another writer, a stranger with a laptop — can check that signature against the public half of your tag and confirm two things:

1. this post came from the holder of that tag, and
2. not one character of it has been changed since.

That's the entire trust model. There's no password check, no session cookie, no "logged in as." Authorship is proven by math on every single post, every time.

The useful consequence: we can't post as you, and we can't stop you from proving you posted something. Moderators can remove content from 1NKY, but nobody can forge your name onto a post, ever.

That one property is what everything else is built out of. A crew is a tag more than one person holds, so a crew post is stamped by the crew rather than by any member. A crew's roster is stamped by the crew, which is why it means something that a writer merely saying they rep the crew doesn't. Getting put on is one writer's stamp vouching for another. A moderator's ban is a stamp too. None of it needs an accounts table, because a stamp anybody can check is stronger than a row in a database anybody can edit.

Why the server can't identify you

The server's job is to hold signed posts and hand them back out. To do that, it needs the public half of your tag and the post itself. It does not need — and does not get — an email, a phone number, a name, a device ID, or a location.

It also doesn't keep the one thing that usually burns people: connection records. Request logging is switched off at the web server, and the database has no field anywhere for an IP address. That isn't a policy we promise to follow; it's a shape the system was built in. The no-logs page shows you where to look.

So the honest answer to "what could 1NKY tell the police about me?" is: your tag's public half, and the posts you already made in public. That's the whole file.

There's one path where even less exists: the onion mirror. The whole app is served over a Tor address, which means no other company is in the request path at all — no content network, no certificate authority, not even a DNS lookup saying you were curious about a graffiti site.

Messages nobody can read

Public posts are public — that's the point of them. Word, the private-message side, works the other way round.

A message is sealed between your device and theirs. What our box holds is an envelope signed by a throwaway name, addressed to the recipient, with the time deliberately smeared by up to two days. So the most our side can say is "somebody sent something to this tag at some point in the last 48 hours." Not who, not when, not what. More on that.

Same name, different mark = different writer

Tag names are not unique and they can't be — there's no registrar, and adding one would mean building the exact account system we refuse to build. Two people can absolutely both call themselves the same thing.

So every tag also shows a short mark: a six-character fingerprint of your public half, plus a little generated glyph, displayed right next to the name.

• Same name and same mark → same writer.
• Same name, different mark → different writer. Somebody's biting, or worse.

Learn to read the mark, not the name. It's the only part that can't be copied.

Your blackbook

Your tag lives on your device, which means the device is the single point of failure. Phones get lost. Browsers clear storage. iPhones are especially rude about this — Safari will throw away a site's local storage after about a week of not opening it, unless the site is installed to your home screen.

Your blackbook is the fix: a one-tap export of your tag, protected by a passphrase you choose, saved as a file and shown as a QR code you can screenshot or print.

• Back it up right after your first post. The app will nag you. Let it.
• Install to your home screen if you're on iOS. Installed apps are exempt from the storage cleanup that wipes ordinary tabs. How.
• Second device? Setup → Link a device, then read the block on the other device and enter the passphrase. Same tag, two devices. Step by step.
• Lost the device but kept the blackbook? Restore it and you're back, same name, same mark, same history.
• Want a belt as well as braces? Setup → Recovery leaves a locked spare copy on our box. We hold the locked file; the passphrase never leaves your device, so we can't open it and neither can anybody who asks us to. It's off unless you turn it on. Details.

Lose your blackbook, lose your tag. Nobody can recover it. Not even us. Especially not us.

That last line is not a customer-service dodge. There is no reset link because there is nothing on our side to reset from — we never had your secret. That's the same property that makes the platform safe for you; it just cuts both ways.

Hanging it up

Writers retire names. When you're done with a tag you can hang it up: you type the name to arm it, the app takes down everything it can find under that tag — what the device remembers and what it can enumerate off the wall, tallying as it goes — puts up one last note saying the tag is hung up, and then forgets the tag entirely. It's a ritual, not an error state.

What it can't do is un-ring a bell. Anything already screenshotted, mirrored, or cached elsewhere is out of everyone's hands, including ours.

Where to go next

• Using it — the guide, starting with your tag.
• The onion mirror — the whole app over Tor, and why you'd bother.
• No logs, by architecture — the claims, and how to check them.
• Opsec for writers — how people actually get caught, and how not to.
• For the nerds — protocols, kinds, and what we deliberately didn't build.