The Archive itself lives at allhumans.world: a dark sky of lights, one for every human who chose to stamp their passage on Earth. This page explains how it works, what keeps its promises, and where every official document lives.
AllHumans was created to preserve humanity's testimony for those who come after us.
Every human experiences life differently. Some find joy, some grief, some purpose, some doubt. Most of those experiences disappear with them.
This institution exists so they don't have to.
AllHumans is a permanent archive of human testimony: a place where every person may leave, in their own words, what it was like to live their life. Not what history says about them, not what others remember, but what they themselves chose to leave behind.
It is built on a simple belief:
Only humanity can tell the story of what it was like to be human.
Every testimony is preserved equally. There are no followers, no popularity, no advertisements, no recommendation algorithm, and no rankings. The first testimony and the millionth are treated exactly the same.
This is not social media.
It is humanity speaking for itself.
You read the principles and accept them, provide an email address where the Archive can answer you, and write your First Testimony: ten fixed questions, each answer limited to 400 characters. Only your name is mandatory, along with any two questions of your choice. The questions never change — that is what makes the Archive a comparable record of humanity across generations.
Your submission is then read by a person and verified according to the standards of the founding era before a Number is assigned. Numbers are given in sequence, never chosen, never reused. Your light is added to the sky, and your page appears at allhumans.world/<your number>.
This is deliberately unhurried. Slow is part of the mission.
At least one year must pass between testimonies. Reflection takes time; the question of what has changed in you is only honest once life itself has changed.
At the moment your First Testimony is submitted, your browser
creates a key (it looks like ah1-…) and shows it to you
once. No one else ever sees it — not the founder,
not the archive. The Archive stores only the key's fingerprint (a
SHA-256 hash), which cannot be reversed into the key.
That key is your only proof of return: entering your Second and Final Testimonies, and withdrawing a testimony, require it. A lost key cannot be recovered or reissued by anyone. Keep it like the key to a vault that holds your own words.
Not a promise — a structure. Five layers, each one checkable by anyone:
1. A fingerprint of your words. The moment your testimony is entered, its exact text is hashed (SHA-256). Change one letter and the fingerprint no longer matches. Your record carries that fingerprint forever, so any copy of your testimony, anywhere, can be proven word-for-word authentic — or exposed as altered.
2. A chained public log. Every event in the Archive's life — every enrollment, every testimony, every withdrawal — is a link in a hash chain, where each entry contains the fingerprint of the one before it. Rewriting history would break every link that follows. The log is public and contains only fingerprints, never words, so anyone can verify the chain without the archive itself.
3. Independent verification. The verification tools are published with the archive's public repository, are deliberately simple, and are specified precisely enough to be rewritten in any programming language, in any decade. You do not have to trust AllHumans — you can check it.
4. A timestamp beyond anyone's control. The chain's newest fingerprint — which stands for everything before it — is regularly frozen into a public checkpoint and stamped into Bitcoin's timeline through OpenTimestamps: a dated attestation witnessed by thousands of independent computers that no one — not a hacker, not a government, not AllHumans itself — can forge or backdate. If anyone ever rewrote the archive's history, their copy would fail against these public anchors. This protects your words even from their own custodian.
5. Many copies, formally kept. The canonical archive is plain text in open formats — no database, no framework, nothing whose disappearance could hurt it — and complete snapshots are deposited with trusted preservation institutions under formal agreements. The entire archive at a hundred million testimonies fits on a single hard drive.
We cannot honestly promise "forever." We promise that every reasonable technical, legal and institutional effort will be made — and that trust here is built on verification, not on promises.
Your words always belong to you. You may withdraw any testimony with your continuity key: the words are removed from the canonical archive and from cooperating preservation partners, the page becomes a marker recording that a testimony once existed and was withdrawn, and the fingerprint remains — proof of what was once said, without saying it. Your number stays yours; a withdrawn testimony's slot stays spent; and copies made by others before withdrawal are beyond anyone's recall — permanence and honesty cut both ways.
AllHumans is free, for every human, always. There is no fee to enter the Archive, no fee to be read, and there will never be advertising — the Constitution forbids turning the archive into a market for attention.
The institution is kept alive by donations, through Open Collective — chosen because its ledger is public: every donation received and every dollar spent is visible to anyone, the same way the Archive's own log is. An institution that asks for trust through verification should publish its books the same way.
A donation buys nothing. No donor names on records, no priority in review, no markings, no tiers — a donation never touches the archive in any way. Every human is equal within the Archive, including the generous ones.
The institution is governed in writing. Reading copies live here; the authoritative texts live in the public repository, protected by the verification described above.