Private by Default, Public by Choice

Timeline OS is a small ecosystem with one hard rule. Everything is private by default, and anything public got there by an explicit, auditable choice.

Three layers do the work.

The private layer is the full stream: every document, note, photo reference, and record, across the local device, the home NAS, and (soon) a Solid Pod. This layer is never public. It is not unlisted and it is not anonymized. There is no route from a visitor to it at all.

The knowledge layer is the librarian: research notes and an LLM-assisted wiki. It reads raw material from the private layer, connects it into something I can understand, and stays internal.

The curated layer is the only outward face. Whatever appears publicly, a portfolio piece, a blog post, a shared album, flowed through explicit curation from the layers below. The public surface consumes it without ever defining or touching the architecture underneath.

A photos view, a journal view, a finance view are different lenses over the same indexed stream, not separate apps hoarding separate copies. That reverses the platform default, where each app owns a shard of your life and the timeline of you exists nowhere.

The research lineage is unusually old for a side project: Engelbart's augmentation work, decades of PIM research showing navigation beats search for personal material, my own 2018 thesis on retrieval routes, and Berners-Lee's Solid protocol for the ownership story. None of the ideas are new. The bet is that they finally compose.

Part of an ongoing series on Timeline OS, a personal operating system for the stream of data that defines a life. See also: Three Ways Back to Your Own Life, The Security Ladder, and A Pod of One's Own.