About Drift

Every card fills the screen: a Wikipedia article or a public domain artwork, one at a time. Each card carries visible threads, which are related directions you can pull to decide where you go next. There is no recommender choosing for you.

A session has a beginning (a topic to start from), a middle (the trail you wander) and an end (a small map of where you went, which you can save and share). The map is only reachable by stopping.

Most feeds are built to hold attention for as long as possible; autoplay, infinite scroll and hidden ranking are the mechanics of it. Drift started as an attempt to build one that works the other way: nothing advances on its own, the reason each card appeared is written on the card, and there are no streaks, badges or notifications. Whether that is actually better is something you would have to use it for a week to know.

• Start. Begin with a topic, pick a realm, drift within a field, follow what is in the news, or let curiosity surprise you.
• Steer.Pull the visible threads to choose your own direction. Every card says why it appeared: the thread you pulled, or “drifting” when you did not choose.
• Arrive. When you stop, your wander becomes a trail map you can keep or export as an image.

A few rules hold for every part of Drift. The full set, with what each one rules out, is on the principles page.

• Transparency over opacity. You always see why a card appeared. No hidden ranking.
• Agency over autoplay. Nothing advances on its own. Every card waits for you.
• Sessions have shape. A beginning, a middle and an end, with the trail map at the end.
• Gentle awareness, not guilt. A count of your stops, and one note after about 25 of them. Nothing stronger than that.

Every card is made from openly licensed, human curated knowledge: Wikipedia articles, under CC BY-SA 4.0, and public domain artworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, under CC0 1.0. Every card links back to the page it came from, whose history credits the people who wrote it. Drift only reshapes that content into cards and threads. It does not write the facts.

Drift is built and maintained by one person, Thomas, in the Netherlands. There is no company behind it. It began as a personal experiment in whether a feed could work differently, and it is shared with a small circle of friends and anyone else who wants to try it. Nothing in it is tuned for time spent.

This page is the short version. There is more detail on:

• How it works, with a demo you can try without an account.
• Principles, the five rules Drift is built under and what each rules out.
• Sources, where each card comes from and under which licence.
• Questions, and notes from building it.

Messages come to me and I read all of them. Tell me what is working, what is broken, or what you wish Drift did. Get in touch here. You can also read exactly what Drift stores.