An anonymous wall for the words people never had the courage to say.
No accounts. No likes. No replies. No feed. Write one sentence, let it go, and drag through everybody else's.
Most of what people feel never gets said, because saying it costs something. This is a place to put the sentence down anyway.
There is deliberately nothing here to chase — no follower count, no reply box, no way to know whether anybody read it. Every feature that would have made this addictive was left out on purpose.
/read is not a scrolling list. It is an infinite plane of paper you drag
through in any direction.
- Drag anywhere to move. Let go and it carries, then settles.
- Scroll or trackpad-swipe to pan; arrow keys work too.
/to search. Everything that doesn't match dims away, the wall flies to the first match on its own, and‹›(orEnter) step through the rest.- There is no zoom. The scale is derived from the viewport once and left alone, which keeps the type crisp and the whole plane on the compositor.
- Leave it alone for a few seconds and it drifts by itself, like weather.
- Everything fades with distance — near the edges of your attention, paper dissolves back into the page.
Under it: one requestAnimationFrame loop that writes three transforms a frame,
per-note culling that only re-renders when the camera has actually travelled,
three parallax depth bands, and a deterministic scatter seeded from the note ids
so the layout is identical on the server and in every browser.
Nothing about it is a library. It's src/lib/wall-layout.js and
src/components/wall/wall.js.
npm installCopy .env.example to .env.local and fill it in:
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@ep-xxxx-pooler.region.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require"
IP_SALT="any-long-random-string"
ADMIN_USER="admin"
ADMIN_PASSWORD="something-long"
Then:
npm run devThe confessions table is created on first use — there is no migration step.
To start with something on the wall instead of an empty room:
npm run seedIt adds ninety confessions written for the project, already approved so they go
straight onto the wall. Running it again only inserts what is missing, so it is
safe to re-run after adding to scripts/. npm run seed:clear removes only the
seeded rows and never touches anything a real person wrote.
Nothing appears on the wall on its own. A new confession is stored as
pending, and the writer is told it will go up once somebody has read it.
/admin is the desk. Sign in with ADMIN_USER / ADMIN_PASSWORD and you
get two lists — Waiting and On the wall — with the full text of each
note and three actions: put it on the wall, take it back down, or delete it for
good (behind a confirm). Every change invalidates the wall cache immediately,
so approving a note puts it up on the next page load.
Both lists are a grid that loads eighteen at a time and pulls the next page as you reach the bottom, with shimmering placeholders while a page is in flight. Fetched pages are held in memory and keyed to a generation counter, so flipping between the two tabs is instant and the cache is dropped the moment anything underneath changes.
The desk updates itself. An open tab polls a counts-only endpoint every six seconds and pulls fresh rows only when the numbers actually move — in place, without a page reload, so nobody loses their scroll position. If you are scrolled down it offers the new arrival instead of moving things under your cursor. A dot beside the heading shows the heartbeat is alive.
Both lists are searchable across title, body and signature, server-side and reflected in the URL. Rebuild wall forces the wall cache to be rebuilt — only needed if the database was changed from outside the app.
The session is a signed, http-only cookie that lasts 12 hours. It carries no
privileges of its own: every action re-checks the session server-side before
touching a row. Changing ADMIN_PASSWORD invalidates every existing session.
Import the repo on Vercel, add DATABASE_URL, IP_SALT,
ADMIN_USER and ADMIN_PASSWORD as environment variables, and deploy. There is no other service and no
separate backend — the whole app is one Next.js project.
Optionally set NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL to your final domain (https://example.com)
so canonical URLs, the sitemap and social cards point at the right place. On
Vercel it is genuinely optional — the deployment domain is picked up on its own —
and anything that isn't a real URL is ignored with a warning rather than failing
the build.
| Pages | / home, /read the wall, /write compose, /about the only page that scrolls, /admin the moderation desk |
| Data | One confessions table on Neon, reached over HTTP with @neondatabase/serverless |
| Reads | Server Components + unstable_cache, tagged wall, revalidated every 5 minutes |
| Writes | A React Server Action — no client-side API layer, no fetch, no loading spinner |
| Moderation | Confessions land as pending and only reach the wall once approved at /admin |
| Admin auth | A single account from the environment, held in an HMAC-signed http-only cookie; no user table, no dependency |
| Invalidation | revalidateTag("wall") on every new confession, so the wall is rebuilt exactly when it changes and never otherwise |
| Public API | GET /api/confessions?limit=&offset=&search= with stale-while-revalidate |
| Abuse | A honeypot field, length limits, and a rate limit keyed on a salted one-way hash of the writer's IP |
| Type | Instrument Serif, Geist, Caveat — self-hosted through next/font |
| Art | Grain, glow and every icon are SVG drawn in-repo; the pressed flowers are original artwork served through next/image |
Confessions are stored with no account, no email and no readable IP. The only
thing kept alongside a note is sha256(IP_SALT + ip), which exists solely so
one person can't flood the wall, and which cannot be turned back into an address.
src/
├── app/
│ ├── page.js home — one screen, no scroll
│ ├── read/page.js the wall
│ ├── write/page.js compose
│ ├── about/page.js the one page that scrolls
│ ├── admin/ the moderation desk
│ ├── api/confessions/ public read API
│ └── *.css design tokens, wall, forms
├── components/
│ ├── wall/ wall engine, pinned pieces, reader
│ ├── marks.js every icon, drawn here as SVG
│ ├── atmosphere.js film grain + slow lights
│ └── compose.js the writing sheet
└── lib/
├── db.js Neon client + schema bootstrap
├── confessions.js cached queries
├── actions.js the server action that writes
├── auth.js the signed admin session
├── admin-actions.js approve, take down, delete
└── wall-layout.js the scatter, tiling and culling maths
Made by Faris Tahoor
Some things are too heavy to keep inside forever.