How Sidelines was built
Sidelines started as one person's frustration: noticing that almost all their news came from the same ten places.
On 2 November 2026 it went from idea to a live site in a single afternoon, built with the help of Claude, an AI made by Anthropic.
The idea, the rules and every decision below came from its founder; the AI helped write the code and explain each step.
The decisions, and why
- Push down what's already everywhere. Most news apps show the big story from more angles. Sidelines shows different stories.
- Cap every source. No outlet can place more than three stories, and the page shows how evenly sources are spread.
- No AI decides what you see. The ranking is a few hundred lines of plain, readable code.
- No ads, no tracking, no accounts, no comments. Nothing to sell, nothing to moderate, no one to please.
- No tip jar. It costs nothing to run, so asking for money would only be reaching. Support goes to the journalists instead.
- Open source under AGPL-3.0. If Sidelines ever breaks its promise, anyone can run the honest version.
- A legacy plan. Everything is meant to pass to the Freedom of the Press Foundation one day, if they'll have it.
- A balanced handful. The top five follow an old idea: something worth knowing (the True), something good,
something wondrous (the Beautiful), and something off the map, with never more than two heavy stories (Aristotle's mean).
The words that mark a story as heavy or hopeful are public in
tones.json (Bacon: show your method).
- Pseudonymous on purpose. The project should stand on its rules, not on who made it.
The founding statement, stamped
The founding promise lives in FOUNDING.md in the project. Its fingerprint (SHA-256) is stamped into
the Bitcoin ledger with OpenTimestamps, so anyone can check it existed, unchanged, since the day it was written.
The proof file is FOUNDING.md.ots in the project.