Everyone is carrying something they are not going to say

Not a secret, necessarily. Just a thing that fits in no conversation you are likely to have. Too small to bring up. Too strange to explain. Too heavy for the people who would have to carry it with you once you did.

So you hold it. And holding it is fine, mostly, until the day it is not.

Your Tree is somewhere to put it down. You write the thing, and it becomes a tree in a forest that anyone can walk through. Nobody knows it is yours. Nobody can ask you about it. It just stands there, one of thousands, giving off a little light.

Why this needs to exist

Everywhere else you can write, you write as someone. Your name is attached, or your handle is, and the handle has a history and an audience and a version of you it has been maintaining for years. That changes what you write before you have written it. You start editing for the room.

The things least worth keeping inside are exactly the ones with the highest cost of being known to have said.

Telling a person is not always the answer either. Telling a person means managing what it does to them — their worry, their advice, the fact that they will remember it about you afterwards. Sometimes you do not want to be helped. You want the thing out of your head and somewhere else, and you want to go back to your day.

A private diary does not quite do it. Something is different about writing where it could be read — even by no one in particular, even by a stranger who will never know your name. It stops being a thought and starts being a thing you said.

That is the whole gap this fills. Somewhere to say it where saying it costs nothing. No account to make, no profile to build, no thread to keep up with, no reply to brace for. One note, one tree, and then you close the tab.

Why the jokes stay

Walk through the forest and you will find real things — people who miss their parents, people who are frightened of being heard, people trying to say something kind to whoever reads it next. You will also find Mike was here, and a tree that is nothing but someone shouting that their tree is the biggest.

Those stay. They are not a failure of the idea; they are the idea working.

A place that only accepts pain becomes a museum of pain, and people start performing sadness to be let in.

The nonsense is what keeps this a real place rather than a shrine. It is the proof that nobody is curating, that anyone can wander in and leave whatever they came with. And it is the same act either way: somebody found a wall where a mark could be left, and left one. The person writing about their marriage and the person writing Mike was here are doing the same thing, at different volumes.

How it works

• 01

  You write up to 500 characters. It becomes a tree, placed at the edge of the forest, shaped and coloured by nothing but itself.

• 02

  There are no accounts and no names. A note carries no trace of who wrote it — not a username, not an email, nothing you could be found by.

• 03

  There are no moderators. Nobody reads these before they are planted, and nobody decides what belongs.

• 04

  A note stays until ten different people report it. As reports come in, its tree gives less light. At ten, it falls.

• 05

  Nothing is ever moved. The forest only grows outwards, so where a tree stands is when it was planted.

Ten is deliberately a lot. It means one person having a bad day cannot take down something that hurt to write, and it means removal takes actual agreement rather than one loud objection.

What it is not

It is not a social network. There is no way to follow anyone, because there is no anyone to follow. It is not a feed — nothing is ranked, promoted, or chosen for you; you walk, and you read whatever you happen to stand in front of. Nothing here can be liked, and there is no number next to your note that goes up.

There is nothing to win. That is the point. Every incentive to perform has been left out on purpose, because the moment a note can earn something, people start writing notes that earn things.

If you came here carrying something

Write it badly. It does not have to be finished or fair or true about anyone but you. Nobody is grading it and nobody will trace it back. Say the thing you were not going to say, plant it, and let it stand there giving off light for whoever walks past at four in the morning needing to know somebody else was awake too.