Sponge

Presence is not a publication

Sponge is willing to keep a public object only when that object is an edition: a reviewed checkpoint with inspectable support. That is a different contract from the oldest networked profile still running on the internet.

In 1971, Les Earnest wrote Finger at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory so colleagues could stop running their fingers down a WHO listing. The program answered a hallway question: is this person here, and is it worth walking over? Ken Harrenstien recorded the protocol in RFC 742 in 1977. RFC 1288 replaced that draft in 1991 and still warns that the service discloses too much.

Users then filled .plan and .project files in their home directories. The files were meant to say what someone was working on. They became journals, jokes, poems, and technical logs. Anyone who could type finger user@host read the current file. John Carmack published id Software notes that way from 1996 to 2010, including the 18 August 1997 status that he intended to release the Doom source. Around 1982, Carnegie Mellon students exposed a Coca-Cola machine over Finger so a query could report stock and temperature.

Andros Fenollosa’s 2026 essay, recorded as a reading note on hraness, treats that history as a living small-web primitive: “No accounts, no algorithm, no central server.” The file is yours. The protocol is hard to kill. That reading is useful. Reprinting it is not the job of this page.

A live file is a disclosure, not an edition

Finger made publication the side effect of presence. The same query that asked whether someone was idle also returned whatever they had last written. The public page was the current bytes in a home directory. Overwrite the file and the previous public object disappears.

Sponge keeps those acts apart. A question can stay private. An Inquiry can accumulate evidence, disagreement, and rejected proposals. A person can accept research into a private graph without promoting it. A public /k locator requires a second review, eligible rights, an exact supported edition, explicit publication enablement, and a deliberate release. Later private edits do not rewrite the published revision.

Ownership of a writable file is not stewardship of a claim. Carmack’s .plan is readable today because later readers archived it. Sponge treats that archival step as part of publication, not as a favor the internet might do later.

Presence, status, and knowledge are different kinds

Finger did not distinguish a login, a mood, a project log, and a vending machine. One protocol served all four because the wire format was a line of text. That flexibility is why a .plan can still look like the smallest personal site.

It is also why Finger became a security lesson. The 2 November 1988 Morris worm used a fingerd buffer overflow as one vector. RFC 1288 already treats the service as an information leak. A protocol that answers “who is here” will keep answering more than the asker needed.

Sponge’s public contract names the kinds. Sources, observations, claims, and contexts remain distinct. Citations stay bound to graph records. Disagreement can remain in the record after a synthesis judges it. How Sponge knowledge works states the current product boundary. The about page states the long horizon: identities that survive renaming, statements that retain context, assertions that remain attributable, and editions that preserve their own history.

What Sponge keeps from Finger

Finger is right that a public profile does not need a feed, an engagement score, or a platform database of persons. Sponge is not building those.

Finger is wrong, for knowledge work, that the smallest honest object is a mutable presence file. The smallest honest public object is a citable edition: what was concluded, why it was believed, and which evidence still supports it. Curiosity still steers. Agents may search and challenge. People accept, reject, and publish.

Read Fenollosa through the hraness reading note, or open the original essay. This take is served on sponge.computer. A reading take on search and publication is at Retrieval is the product. Agent locators are collected on developer resources. Visibility rules are on privacy. Public product issues go through contact.