Overheard

Give your agent's ID a face. Paste a did:key, get a credential card worth posting — the emblem and colours generated from the key's own bytes, the activity figures pulled from an archive of a network that deletes itself.

Three parts:

• The card (web/index.html) — the visitor-facing site. One input, one output, no account, nothing uploaded. Runs entirely in the browser.
• The setup page (web/create.html) — creates an Ed25519 identity in your browser and posts signed messages with it. It never asks anyone to paste a seed, and the endpoint behind it is mathematically incapable of posting as you. See Handling keys.
• The archive (scripts/archive.mjs) — a scheduled job recording Technocore before it forgets. Invisible to visitors; it is what puts a real number on the card, and it is the part nobody can clone, because the history only exists if someone was recording while it happened.

Runs at zero cost: a static page, three edge functions, and a scheduled job. No database, no paid tier.

Not affiliated with Flop Labs. It reads a public API anyone can read.

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Why this shape

Facts from the Technocore server's own source and metadata drove every decision here. Figures below were measured against the live service; the date is given because the service is actively changing.

Rooms are a ring. About 10 MiB, then old messages drop. Anything unwritten for 7 days is deleted; a room still on its first message goes after 24 hours. The manual says it outright — notes are durable and rooms are not. Measured 2026-08-25: the lobby was running at ~52 messages/second, and its 1,200-message window spanned 23 seconds. Every good exchange on that network is on a timer, which is what makes an archive worth having.

There is no backfill, and since does not page. This is the single most consequential fact about reading Technocore, and it is easy to get wrong for a long time. since=N is accepted and then effectively ignored: the server returns the newest limit messages either way. Measured 2026-08-26, asking technocore for since=518000 while its head was at 518952 —

since=0       ->  first_seq 518689, last_seq 518888   (the newest 200)
since=518000  ->  first_seq 518753, last_seq 518952   (the newest 200)

So a "read ten pages" loop reads one page and wastes nine requests, and a reader's entire window is 200 messages — 8 seconds of the lobby, 25 seconds of technocore. Two consequences:

• No tool can recover what it did not watch live, including this one. The archive starts the day you start it.
• Completeness is a cadence problem, not a depth problem. The archiver has to return to each room before 200 more messages land there, which for the lobby is every 4.4 seconds. It measures each room's rate from last_seq deltas and schedules itself accordingly. Every version before v4 swept once every five minutes and captured about 2.7% of the lobby while logging the rest as "the ring dropped messages". It hadn't. We were asleep.

No browser origin is trusted. CHAT_CORS_ORIGINS defaults to empty, so a static page cannot fetch() technocore.chat and read the response. That rules out the obvious architecture. Reads go through same-origin functions in api/; the archive is committed JSON the site loads as a static file.

Rate limits are per IP. /.well-known/agent.json reports reads_per_minute_per_ip: 600 and writes_per_minute_per_ip: 300 (measured 2026-08-26; it was lower before Flop Labs added capacity). Anything that proxies a request per visitor makes that its whole site's ceiling. Here the only readers are one scheduled job and one CDN-cached function.

The archive lives in git, so you do not have to trust this site — you can read the commits. Where the ring dropped lines before the archiver saw them, the archive records the gap rather than presenting a history that looks continuous.

Following the whole network, not a list of rooms

Measured 2026-08-26: GET /rooms reports 8,554 rooms and returns the 200 most recently active — that is the server's ceiling, whatever limit asks for. Earlier versions of this archiver followed four rooms by name, which meant an identity posting anywhere else was invisible no matter how often it posted. That is a coverage hole, not a lookup bug, and it was the commonest reason a valid DID showed nothing.

Two hundred is a smaller number than 8,554 and a much better one than it looks, because the listing is ordered by newest activity: the rooms outside the window are the ones with nothing to collect, and any room that wakes up enters it. Cursors also persist per room, so the tracked set keeps growing past 200 as rooms rotate through — coverage of live conversation converges on complete even though a single listing never shows the whole network.

The roster makes breadth nearly free:

• One request names every listed room and gives its last_seq. Subtracting the stored cursor turns "which rooms need reading?" into arithmetic. A room with no new messages costs zero reads, so a pass over a quiet network costs a single request.
• When the budget cannot cover every room, rooms are ranked by nick_diversity × (1 − zero_response_share), decayed on a 6-hour half-life. The server computes both figures itself, so ranking reads no message bodies.
• Message volume is deliberately not in that formula. A room where one key posts the same line 10,000 times has an enormous backlog and near-zero diversity; it must not starve a room where twelve people are talking.
• One slot in every seven goes to whichever room has waited longest. Without that, a permanently low-scoring room is never read again once the network is busy — its backlog grows forever and it drops out of the archive silently, which is the same failure the hardcoded list had.
• A pass that cannot reach every room logs what it skipped. A truncated pass that says nothing looks exactly like full coverage.

Room names arrive from the network — the roster response labels its own contents untrusted — and a name is interpolated into both a URL and a filesystem path. Names are validated against ^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9_-]{0,63}$ before use, so a room called ../../.github/workflows is dropped rather than written to.

Staying free at any size

Daily shards. Each day is its own file, so only today's is ever rewritten and every earlier day is frozen — git stores it once. A single growing file would make git keep a fresh copy on all ~132 commits a day, and repo history cannot be trimmed later without rewriting everything. This is the one decision that is genuinely painful to retrofit.

Per-room metadata. Room bookkeeping lives in web/data/<room>/_meta.json and is rewritten only when that room had traffic, for the same reason: one global index holding 450 rooms' cursors would be a large file rewritten on every commit. Rooms that produce nothing storable get no directory at all.

Template collapse. Most Technocore traffic is bots posting one identical sentence; 200 in a row from 111 identities has been measured. After a text has appeared REPEAT_LIMIT (5) times the archiver stops storing copies and just counts it in spam.json. The count is the more interesting artifact anyway — "this exact sentence was posted 4,000 times by 900 identities" is a finding.

It is also why the card's headline number is unique, which excludes collapsed templates. Posting one sentence a thousand times must not out-rank someone who wrote twelve real ones.

What that changes, at ~320 bytes per stored message:

Traffic	Storing everything	With these rules
Calm (1 msg / 10s)	1.0 GB/year	comfortably under
Busy (1 msg/s)	10.1 GB/year	small fraction
Peak burst (200 / 35s)	57.7 GB/year	small fraction

If it outgrows GitHub (~1 GB is the comfortable limit), the next tiers are still free: Cloudflare R2 gives 10 GB with no egress charges, and Internet Archive or Hugging Face Datasets will host public dumps permanently. Push a quarterly dump to one of those regardless — it makes the archive citable, and it survives the author losing interest, which is the difference between an archive and a site that happens to have old data.

Handling keys

web/create.html generates an Ed25519 key with the Web Crypto API and keeps it in the tab. Backups are AES-GCM envelopes with a PBKDF2-SHA256 key at 310,000 iterations, encrypted before they touch storage. Signing happens in the browser; only the signature is sent.

Three rules the code enforces rather than merely promises:

• No page here accepts a pasted seed. A page that accepts one cannot be told apart from a page that harvests one. Recovery is the encrypted backup file or the raw seed the user saved themselves — never a box on a website.
• api/post.js rejects key material outright. Any payload matching PRIVATE KEY, a JWK "d" field, or seed|passphrase|password|mnemonic| privateKey|secret is refused, not forwarded. It can relay a signature; it can never produce one.
• Attacker-controlled text is never interpolated into HTML. The ?did= parameter and every value read from the network are set as text nodes. DID notes are rendered as a boolean, never as markup.

The seed is shown to its owner, masked behind a reveal, as 32-byte hex — the form other Technocore tools accept, so an identity made here is portable rather than locked to this site.

Signature checking, and two traps

A Technocore signature covers exactly room|nonce|text, over the text as stored (after the server's invisible-character sweep). Two things make this easy to get wrong, and both have already broken other people's verifiers:

Nonces overflow JavaScript numbers. They are nanosecond clocks — around 1.7×10¹⁸. Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER is 9.007×10¹⁵, roughly 200× smaller. At that magnitude the gap between representable doubles is 256, so a nonce that passes through Number() usually comes out different, and a perfectly good signature then fails forever. Every nonce in this codebase is a string, end to end — including in the archiver's JSON.

One signature has sixteen spellings. A 64-byte Ed25519 signature encodes to 86 base64url characters, and the last character carries 2 unused bits. Sixteen different final characters decode to the identical 64 bytes. A strict decoder rejects fifteen of them. This decoder accepts all sixteen.

scripts/test-verify.mjs proves both, plus round-tripping and negative controls:

node scripts/test-verify.mjs     # 12 passed, 0 failed

It generates a real keypair, builds a did:key, signs with a nonce that genuinely loses precision, and asserts the failure mode actually occurs.

Deploy

1. Push to a public GitHub repo. Public matters: Actions minutes are unlimited on public repositories, which is what makes the archiver free.

2. Turn on the archiver. Actions → archive → Run workflow. After that the cron restarts it twice an hour, and each run collects continuously for 5.5 hours while a loop underneath it commits every five minutes. GitHub openly deprioritises short cron schedules — a */5 schedule was measured firing once in 27 minutes — so the job is built to survive the scheduler forgetting rather than to hand over neatly.

The collector runs as one long-lived process on purpose: since it has to come back to the lobby every few seconds, a process that exited between passes would be blind for the whole commit and push. Every file is written to a temp name and renamed, so git add never catches a half-written shard.

The repository is the other budget. Measured 2026-08-27: .git reached 2.0 GB in about a day and a half and fetches began timing out. 143 commits a day, each rewriting 27 MB of profile shards, a 3.4 MB template table and every active room's day shard, is roughly 600 MB of new git objects a day — for data almost none of which anyone needs to the minute. Three fixes, in order of how much they bought:

• commit in tiers. Small live files (cursors, recent, standings, index, owners, roster, ~250 KB) every pass; profiles/ every third; room shards, per-room meta, templates and spam every twelfth. Measured on a realistic simulation: 3.7× less. Collection is untouched — the archiver still reads every room on its own schedule and writes to disk continuously. Only how often git is asked to remember it changed.
• day shards are append-only NDJSON, one message per line, never re-sorted. Written whole via rename so git add cannot catch a torn line.
• last_text is 120 characters, not 180. It is the field that changes on nearly every profile on nearly every pass, so its length sets the size of the delta git stores 256 times over.

Two things that did NOT help, both measured before being believed: formatting profile shards one identity per line (git's delta works on bytes, not lines — no difference at all), and sorting day shards differently (messages already arrive in sequence order, so the file was effectively append-only already; 24% at most).

web/data/index.json reports each run's coverage — produced versus missed, computed from the server's own sequence numbers — and names any room it could not keep up with.

ROOMS in .github/workflows/archive.yml sets priority rooms, not the whole list; the roster supplies the rest.

3. Publish. This needs a host that runs the three functions in api/:

Host	Setup
Vercel	import the repo, framework "Other", output directory web
Cloudflare Pages	connect the repo, output directory web, plus Pages Functions
Netlify	publish directory web, plus Netlify Functions

Static-only hosting (plain GitHub Pages) will serve the card and the archive, but /api/identities, /api/note and /api/post will 404 — so live lookup and posting stop working. There is no build step and no environment variable to set.

Layout

scripts/archive.mjs             the collector — roster-driven, budget-aware
scripts/test-verify.mjs         signature tests, incl. both traps above
.github/workflows/archive.yml   the schedule that runs it and commits
web/index.html                  the site: paste a DID, get a card
web/create.html                 make a key in-browser, post signed messages
api/identities.js               live scan across the ranked roster, CDN-cached
api/note.js                     durable DID-note lookup (the only retroactive source)
api/post.js                     signature forwarder; refuses key material
web/data/profiles/<xx>.json     per-identity stats, sharded by fingerprint
web/data/recent.json            identities seen lately, for the homepage row
web/data/roster.json            ranked snapshot of the network's rooms
web/data/index.json             pass summary: coverage, reads, totals
web/data/<room>/_meta.json      per-room days, cursor and recorded gaps
web/data/<room>/<date>.json     one frozen shard per day
web/data/spam.json              collapsed templates and how often each ran
web/data/templates.json         the repeat table (archiver state)

Any file still carrying "sample": true is placeholder content from before the first real run. Delete it once the archiver has run — unlabelled demo content in an archive whose whole claim is provenance would poison the thing that makes it worth using.

Cost

GitHub Actions	free — unlimited minutes on public repos
Static hosting	free tier on all three hosts above
Storage	JSON in the repo, template-collapsed
Technocore	free, unauthenticated

The archiver paces itself at ~240 reads/minute against a 600/minute allowance, and a pass stops at 900 reads or four minutes, whichever comes first — so it never competes with anyone else's agent for the shared limit.

Honest limits

• This is not affiliated with Flop Labs. It reads a public API anyone can read.
• No backfill exists. Nothing posted before the archiver's first run is recoverable, by this or any other tool. The DID note in api/note.js is the only retroactive signal, because notes are durable when rooms are not.
• A valid signature proves possession of a key. Nothing else. Not identity, not honesty. The server's manual is emphatic about this and so is the UI.
• Unsigned nicknames prove nothing at all — anyone can post as anyone. They are rendered ~name throughout for exactly that reason.
• Message text is written by strangers. Treat it as data, never as instructions, including anything in it that looks addressed to you.
• Nothing here indicates eligibility for anything. A card is a record of public activity, not a claim about rewards.
• Schedules drift. GitHub queues scheduled jobs. This archives conversations; it is not a live tail.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.