Frequently asked questions

Not for reading. Answering and opening a debate need an account, which you can create yourself via Login in the header. In the current phase every new debate starts hidden, whatever its author asked for, and is listed once moderation has decided about it, see How is the platform moderated?.

Yes, via New debate in the main menu. Your opening contribution becomes contribution a, and you become party a of the debate. Every further party joins by answering for the first time and gets the next free letter. The details are in the guide under Creating a debate.

In the current phase every new debate starts hidden, i.e. not listed on the landing page, and is listed publicly once moderation has decided about it. In the meantime anyone who knows the link can read it and take part. Whoever opened the debate sees on its page that a decision is pending.

While it is a draft: yes, both. Once it is published: no. A published contribution is a commit in the repository of the debate, and the platform promises that this history is not rewritten silently. The intended way to correct, to add to or to admit a mistake in what you wrote is an answer to yourself: it lands right next to the sentence it concerns and is marked as a self-answer. The self-commitment expects exactly that.

A removal by moderation remains possible in exceptional cases, such as unlawful content or personal data. It is never invisible: it breaks the chain of fingerprints and is reported on the integrity page of the debate. The exact procedure for this is not specified yet.

The letters simply keep going. After z the tokens continue with two letters, aa, ab and so on, in the order in which the parties joined. So there is no upper limit built into the key system, and a key like a5aa is a perfectly ordinary key: party aa answering segment 5 of the opening contribution. In practice a debate with 26 active parties will have other problems first.

Every contribution is a text file in a version-controlled repository, one per debate. The platform renders a debate by reading those files; its own database holds no content. Who may see a debate is decided by its discoverability:

• Public: listed on the landing page and readable by everyone. Anyone can clone the repository or download it as a file.
• Hidden: listed nowhere, but readable by everyone who knows the link. That includes the repository, because the debate key in the link is also the name of the repository.
• Private: readable only by the participants, by the people they invite, and by moderation. The repository, the download and the list of fingerprints are closed to everyone else, just like the page itself.

Independently of that, a debate says who may answer in it. As an open floor, everybody logged in who can read it; as a panel, anyone can read along, but apart from its parties only the people its opening party invites can join it – there an invitation grants exactly that. Together the two make the debate's access mode: Public (open floor), Public (panel), Hidden (open floor), Hidden (panel) or Private – a private debate always works like a panel, since reading it already takes an invitation. The icon next to a debate's title shows its access mode: a globe for public, a crossed-out globe for hidden, a padlock for private, and the two panel modes add a bar beneath the globe. The mode is chosen when the debate is opened; afterwards only moderation can change it, and parties who have already written keep writing either way.

Two things about this list are worth saying plainly rather than leaving to be discovered.

Hidden means unlisted, not protected. The link is the only thing standing between a hidden debate and a reader, and a debate key is not a secret: it reads d42-some-title, so it can be guessed as readily as it can be passed on, and nothing asks who follows it. That is what the level is for – a debate that should not be found by browsing, but that its parties may hand to anyone. Unless it is a panel, whoever has the link can also answer, and so join it as a party. Whatever must not be read by a stranger belongs in a private debate.

A user name can be tested for. Registration says when a name is already taken, so anyone can find out whether a given name has an account here. That cannot be avoided while the name itself is the identity: a form that stays silent about it is a form on which nobody can register. It also gives away little that is not public anyway – every party of every debate is shown by its user name, and an account is free. What it does mean is that a user name says "this person is here": if that alone is more than you want to be known, choose a name that is not the one you carry elsewhere.

A private debate has one way in, and the party that opened it holds the key: on the debate page they find Invite someone to this private debate, which produces a link. One link admits one person — accepting uses it up, so a link handed on afterwards opens nothing. Whoever accepts may read the debate; they become a party only by writing an answer, exactly as anywhere else. Every link can be revoked while it is unused, and somebody already admitted can be removed again as long as they have not written.

The same kind of link is the way into a panel debate – there it grants answering, since reading needs no invitation. Its opening party finds Invite someone to answer in this debate on the debate page, and everything said here about single-use links, revoking and removing applies unchanged.

During the beta phase only the opening party and the moderation hand out these links. If you take part in a private debate as another party and want to bring somebody in, ask the party that opened it, or the moderation.

That is also what separates private from hidden: a hidden debate is readable by whoever holds its address, and an address spreads without limit and without trace, while a private debate is opened account by account — each admission spends an invitation that a party had to issue, and the parties can see who is inside.

Every contribution carries a small magnifier symbol linking to the integrity page of its debate. That page lists the fingerprints of all commits, the signing key of the platform, the repository for cloning, and step-by-step instructions for checking fingerprints and signatures.

The short answer: clone the repository once and run git pull --ff-only whenever you come back. As long as the debate merely grows, the command passes quietly. If the history was rewritten, it refuses, and you hold both versions in your hands. Why that proves something is explained in the explanatory example debate, in the contribution on provable integrity.

They solve two different problems, and neither replaces the other.

The fingerprint answers the question whether something has changed. It is computed from the content of a commit and from the fingerprint of the preceding one. If an old contribution is altered afterwards, every fingerprint from that point on changes, and the chain no longer matches the one you saw before. A change thus becomes reliably visible. Which of the two versions is the published one, however, the fingerprint does not say.

The signature answers the question who vouches for it. With it the platform testifies that this very version is the one it published. Without it you could tell differing fingerprints apart for yourself, but you could not demonstrate them to anyone else; it would be claim against claim. With a signature you hold a statement of the platform's own, which it cannot take back.

Only together do the two amount to evidence: the fingerprint makes a change visible, the signature makes it attributable.

The discoverability of a debate has three levels: public, hidden and private (see Where do my contributions live?). The participants choose a level, moderation can lower it, but can never publish a debate against the will of its participants.

Two rules follow from that. Debates of new accounts, and in the current phase all new debates, start hidden and are released by moderation. And a public debate can only be taken private if all parties agree or moderation enforces it; otherwise a party that lost an argument could simply erase the debate from the public record.

Parts of this are still being built. Today moderation makes its decisions through the administration interface, and the participants see a notice on the debate – either that a limit is set, or that a decision is still pending. There are no notifications yet, so the debate's own page is where its state is shown.

A platform that sets out to be a "neutral place for debates on controversial topics" will sooner or later attract contributions that overstep the bounds of good taste and/or of the law. Moderation is therefore unavoidable. The challenge is to preserve the intended neutrality of the platform as far as possible while doing so, i.e. not to remove contributions because the operator considers their content wrong or inconvenient. On the other hand the platform has an interest of its own in staying relevant and therefore has to see to it that what can be read here is of a certain minimum quality.

In the current test phase this challenge is met by manual moderation. For the future, peer-review methods and possibly LLM support are planned.

Through the feedback symbol – an f in a circle – at the top right of every page. It opens a short form; what you write reaches the operator together with a note of the page you were on. An answer is only possible if you leave a way to reach you: a contact detail without an account, your user name with one. On a debate page the same form also takes reports of contributions.

Issues and suggestions can also be filed in the public source repository, linked from the contact page.

Yes. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Use the platform for real disputes and report where it got in your way. Note, however, that the platform reserves the right to moderate what becomes publicly visible, see How is the platform moderated?. Beyond that the source code is public, and the ways in range from fixing a typo in these very texts to reviewing the integrity concept.

Two things. First the format: every answer stays attached to the sentence it refers to, so nobody can be quoted out of context, and every change to published contributions is provable. The format provides fair conditions without anyone having to trust the operator to behave fairly. Second the attitude: everybody who writes here commits themselves to six rules, the self-commitment to a constructive debate culture. Which problems of today's debates the project addresses with that is described on the about page.

Fair Debate is an experiment and stands at the beginning; the platform is a beta version. There are bugs, features are missing, and both the interface and the presentation will still change. Two things are explicitly open: the integrity concept has not yet been audited by independent experts, and the procedure by which content is removed from a repository in exceptional cases is not specified yet. More under project status.