The registry 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 is a permanent registry of human testimony. Every human may hold one Registry number and leave at most three testimonies in a lifetime — a First, a Second, and a Final — each answering the same fixed questions, each immutable once entered, kept for as long as human effort can keep anything.
It is not social media. There are no likes, no comments, no followers, no rankings, no advertisements, no recommendation algorithm. Every human is equal within the Registry: the newest record is presented exactly like the oldest.
You read the principles and accept them, give an email where the Registry can answer you, and write your First Testimony: ten fixed questions, each answer up to 400 characters, every answer optional except your name. 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 — every testimony is, in this era — and verified to the standard of the 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 in the mission.
At least one year must pass between testimonies. The reflective questions — what has changed in you — are only truthful once a life has moved.
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 Registry 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. Four 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 Registry'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. 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 Registry 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.
The institution is governed in writing. Reading copies live here; the authoritative texts live in the public repository, protected by the verification described above.