About Drift

Every card is a full screen of real, human knowledge: a Wikipedia article or a public domain artwork, shown one at a time. Each card carries visible threads, which are related directions you can pull to steer where you go next. You are not fed by a hidden recommender. You choose the path, and the feed follows you.

Every session has a shape: a beginning (a topic to start from), a middle (the trail you wander), and an end (a small map of where your curiosity went, which you can save and share). The reward waits at the exit, not at the next swipe.

Most feeds are built to hold your attention as long as possible. Autoplay, infinite scroll, and opaque ranking are designed to keep you guessing and keep you there. Drift is a deliberate antidote to that. Nothing advances on its own. Nothing is hidden. There are no streaks, no red badges, and no notifications trying to pull you back. It is scrolling that leaves you a little more curious, not a little more numb.

• 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. You always see why the next card appeared: the thread you chose, or an honest “drift”.
• Arrive. When you stop, your wander becomes a trail map you can keep or export as an image.

A few principles hold for every part of Drift, even when a shortcut would be easier:

• Transparency over opacity. You always see why a card appeared. No hidden ranking.
• Agency over autoplay. Every card waits for you. There is no bottomless feed teasing one more.
• Sessions have shape. A clear beginning, middle, and end, with the trail map as the payoff.
• Gentle awareness, not guilt. A quiet count of your stops and a soft nudge after a while, and nothing more.

Every card is made from openly licensed, human curated knowledge: Wikipedia articles, under CC BY-SA 4.0, and public domain artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago, 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 never invents facts, and it is never in the driver's seat. You are.

Drift is a small, independent project, built and maintained by one person, Thomas, not a company. It began as a personal experiment in healthier scrolling and is shared with a small circle of friends and anyone else who wants a calmer way to be curious. It is not built to maximize your time or harvest your attention, and it never will be.

A real person reads every message. Tell us what is working, what is broken, or what you wish Drift did. Get in touch here. You can also read exactly what Drift stores.