Cittadelle is an invite-only platform for documenting, verifying and debating
the sources of history and politics.
Not a forum. Not an archive. A structured space where every claim traces back
to a document — and every document can be challenged.
One idea. Everything else follows.
Everywhere else, a claim and its evidence are separate things:
the claim travels, the evidence stays behind.
Here they are the same object.
…as the Chilean cables show —SRC-0034✓ Verified · 3 notes
Every document, entity, contestation and argument on Cittadelle has a code.
Write that code anywhere — a post, a note, a Brief, a rebuttal — and it becomes
a live citation that carries the document's verification status with it, at the
moment you read it. You cannot quote a source without also quoting how well the
community has established that it says what you claim it says.
If it is later contested, everywhere it was ever cited says so.
Why this exists
Nobody owns the truth. But somebody owns the archives, the access, the authority
to certify, and the channel that carries the verdict — and owning that is close
enough. Own what can be established, and you own what people are able to know.
A truth you are handed and cannot check is not knowledge. It is obedience.
It may even be accurate, and it is still a lie in the way it reaches you,
because it asks you to believe instead of giving you something to examine.
So nothing here is certified by us. The evidence travels attached to the claim,
the procedure is written down, and both are open to anyone who walks in. Every
status is provisional: contestable the day after it is granted, including the ones
we would rather keep. We are not against institutions or expertise — we are against
claims nobody outside the room can check, ours included.
Not a truth you are told.A truth you can see.
How it works
◈
Sources
Members submit documents — archival, academic, journalistic, financial,
legal, audiovisual, photographic — and the community establishes them.
A document with an official URL or a DOI is authenticated by three
members confirming the reference. Everything else is verified by
three argued notes, each bringing its own distinct evidence.
⬡
Chambers
Persistent communities where the work happens, divided into strands of
enquiry. Moderators keep them tidy; nobody adjudicates what is true.
Disagreement is not settled by a moderator but by contestation — a formal
procedure with its own page, its participants on the record, and an
explicit rule for how it ends.
◈
Proposals
Nothing enters the shared maps unilaterally, and nothing requires
permission from an authority. You propose a connection with your reasoning
and your sources; three members endorse it, each with their own reasoning;
then it migrates into the global graph — permanently, publicly, and
traceable back to the case that put it there.
⬢
Graphs
Three maps of the same world, each answering a different question.
Octopus: who is connected to whom.
Follow the Money: who gave what to whom.
Pyramid: who owns what, and how much — computing the
ultimate beneficiary behind a chain of shell companies.
▤
Briefs
Where a line of enquiry ends: a short documented argument, written by at
least two members, citing its sources by code and embedding the graph
connections it relies on. Briefs are not contested — they are
interpretations. Answer a reading with a reading.
◌
The archive
Everything survives the discussion that produced it. Sources belong to the
platform, not to the Chamber that found them. Contested notes stay as
history. Superseded ownership figures stay queryable. When a member leaves,
their contributions remain, reattributed — the record does not lose evidence
because a person did.
Traces
Power leaves traces, and so does an investigation. Trace a source, a contestation,
a proposal, a Brief, an entity, a strand or a post, and Traces tells you what moved
around it while you were away — a verification, a contestation opened or closed, a
new citation, a mention in somebody else's argument. It shows how the things you
follow point to one another, finds the ones worth following that you had not
noticed, and draws all of it as a map of your own. Nobody else can see what you
trace: a page says how many people trace it, never who.
Sources→Chambers→Proposals→Graphs→Briefs
The Method
The mechanics in detail — the seven kinds of source and why they are
established differently, what a verification note must contain, how the
three contestations resolve, when a connection is
direct rather than structural, and how Traces decides what
reaches you.
✕No karma, no scores, no gamification. A grade exists, but it is invisible in the feed — so that an argument outweighs a reputation.
✕No arbiter of truth. No moderator, no editor, no committee decides whether a document is genuine.
✕No algorithmic feed. Nothing is ranked by engagement. What is recent and what is active, nothing else.
✕No advertising, no investors, no data sold. Running costs are covered by voluntary support.
✕Money buys nothing inside. No badge, no visibility, no priority. A note must never be suspected of carrying weight because its author pays.
✕No private group channels. If more than two people need to talk, that is what a Chamber is.
✕No read receipts, no presence, no last-seen. Nothing that turns attention into an obligation.
✕No public record of what you follow. What you trace reveals what you are investigating. A page can say how many people trace it — never who.
✕No deletion of the record. A contested note stays visible. Being proved wrong is part of the history, not something to erase.
Frequently asked questions
Access
Cittadelle is invite-only. Members invite people they expect to contribute seriously, and who invited whom is recorded and visible on both profiles. Inviting is an act with your name attached — which is the whole mechanism. There is no public registration form.
Once. Your username is your signature — there is no separate display name to hide behind, and everything you submit, verify or contest carries it. Since nobody picks a name carefully in the thirty seconds it takes to accept an invitation, you get one change: everything you have already signed then shows the new name. The old one is retired for good, so no one else can wear it, and links to it still lead to you.
Yes. The source archive, all three graphs, entity pages, Briefs, Search, this Manifesto and The Method are open to anyone. Chambers, discussion threads, The Roll and anything personal are for members. The knowledge is public; the ability to add to it is not.
Three when you arrive, one more for every ten contributions, and one on first reaching certain grades. Each code works once. Everything counts as a contribution — submitting a source, writing a verification note, opening or defending a contestation, proposing a connection or endorsing someone else's, co-authoring a Brief. The Method lists what each is worth →
You can delete your account from Settings. Your sources, notes and posts stay in the archive, reattributed to a member called [Departed] — deliberately not "[deleted]". The record does not lose evidence because a person left.
Sources
Seven kinds: archival and official documents, academic research, journalism, financial records, legal documents, audiovisual material, and images. Each has its own page shape and its own metadata fields — a court ruling needs a case number, a paper needs a DOI, a photograph needs a place and a photographer.
A title, a URL or an uploaded file, and a note explaining what the document is and why it matters. Everything else is optional and can be completed later by anyone. Video and audio are always linked, never uploaded.
A specific category, not a compliment. A source is primary when the organisation that published it is the authority on what it says — when the document is the fact rather than a report of it. A court's own ruling, a law in the official gazette, a company's own filing about its own accounts, a book identified by its ISBN. In practice you can tell by the reference: there is an official URL, a DOI or an ISBN that lets anyone open it and find the document there. Primary sources take a different verification path from everything else. The Method explains both →
That the document exists, is genuine, and is the one it claims to be. Nothing more. It does not establish that anything written inside it is true, and it does not establish that some particular sentence in it says what a member says it says. Those are checked on the other path, with notes. Put simply: on a primary source members check the document; on every other source they check what it says. The Method →
You add the passage as a source of its own and link it back with the field "Quoted from". This is not duplication — it is the only way the contents of a document get on the record. Authenticating a ruling establishes that the ruling is real; it establishes nothing about any sentence in it, and nobody will read four hundred pages to check a claim made in passing. So the work is authenticated once, and each passage taken out of it is verified on its own. The passage does not repeat the work's author, publisher or date: those stay on the work's page and are shown on the passage's page for reference. If transcribing is impractical — a table, a chart — you can attach a photograph of the page instead, though transcribing as well is strongly encouraged: only text can be searched, quoted into a Brief, or contested word by word. The Method →
An empty field can be filled by anyone — that is how the archive improves. A field that is already filled can be edited only by the uploader, and once a source is verified it is effectively frozen. Errors in a verified source are handled by contestation, not by quiet overwriting.
Sources with a URL are submitted to the Internet Archive when saved, and the page links to the archived copy. That copy is what keeps a source checkable years later.
Verification
It depends on the kind of source, and this is the single most important thing to understand. A primary source is authenticated: three members confirm the reference is genuine — no argument required, because there is nothing to argue about, only something to check. Everything else is verified: three argued notes, each carrying its own distinct reference. Three notes citing the same thing do not count as three. Full detail in The Method →
An argument, and a reference: an internal source code, an external URL, or an uploaded file. The reference must differ from the ones already used on that source. If you cite external material, you will be prompted to add it to the archive as a source in its own right — which is how the archive grows sideways.
Unsubmitted, Reviewed (one note), Verified (three notes), Authenticated (a confirmed primary source), In Review (one contestation open), Contested (three or more), and Dismissed (a contestation rejected). See them laid out →
Yes. The independence requirement is on the references, not on the people. What stops a source being waved through is that three genuinely distinct pieces of evidence are hard to fabricate — not a rule about who may click.
No, and this distinction is the foundation of the whole platform. Verification asks whether the document is authentic and is what it claims to be. Whether its contents are true, and what they mean, is argued in Chambers and settled — provisionally — in Briefs.
Contestation
One contester moves it to In Review immediately, visibly. Three make it Contested. The ratio of contesters to defenders is always on display, so the community can weigh it. It resolves as Dismissed when defenders outnumber contesters — the contesters do not have to withdraw for that to happen.
Nobody. There is no moderator, editor or committee with that power, by design. There is a procedure with an explicit rule, running in public with every participant's argument on the record. The alternative — someone trusted to adjudicate — is exactly what Cittadelle exists to avoid.
Yes, on non-primary sources. The contested note stops counting toward the threshold, so the source may drop a status. It resolves when a new valid note replaces it or the contester withdraws. The contested note is never removed — it stays as history.
Yes, on the same mechanism. A contested connection is drawn differently in the graph and its panel links to the contestation. It does not reach back and reopen the proposal that created it: history stays frozen, the dispute is about the present claim.
Graphs and proposals
Three maps of the same world answering different questions. Octopus: who is connected to whom. Follow the Money: who gave what to whom. Pyramid: who owns what, and how much — including the computation of effective ownership through chains of holdings, which is how you find the person behind three shell companies.
You propose it inside a Chamber, with your reasoning and your sources. It appears as a provisional element in that Chamber's working map. Three members endorse it, each with their own reasoning. Then it migrates into the global graph in one irreversible step, permanently linked back to the proposal that created it.
A direct connection is stated plainly by the source: endorsers only confirm it. A structural connection — control, influence, infiltration, parallel structure — is an inference, and every endorser must deposit a note explaining the inferential chain. Pyramid has no structural option at all: a shareholding is either documented or it is not. The Method walks through it →
No. A revised claim is a new proposal that supersedes the old connection; the old one stays queryable as history. In Pyramid this is explicit — ownership is stated "as of" a date, and a slider moves the whole graph back in time.
Briefs
Any member, but publication requires at least two contributors. A Brief is not a personal essay — the minimum is structural, not decorative.
A short documented argument. The name carries both senses: a brief document, and a brief argued in front of a court. Not an encyclopaedia entry — a mini-thesis about connections found inside one strand of enquiry. Its first section, fixed in place and impossible to remove, states that thesis in the author's own words — everything that happens to the Brief afterwards answers it directly.
Because they are interpretations, not documents. Contestation is a procedure for establishing whether a thing is what it claims to be, and a reading of the evidence is not that kind of claim. If you disagree, write your own Brief or open a Chamber.
That you think the argument holds. It is a count, not a score, and it confers nothing on the author.
Traces
The page of the things you follow. Press ∴ Trace, next to Share, on a source, a contestation, a proposal, a Brief, an entity, a strand or a post. Traces then shows what has moved around each of them since your last visit, how they are linked to one another, the things worth tracing that you do not follow yet, and a map of all of it, called Path. The Method explains it in full.
No. What you follow reveals what you are investigating, so it is visible to you alone — not on your profile, not in The Roll, and no page shows it to anyone else. A page shows only how many people trace it, "Traced by 12", never who. The notes you add to your traces are private in the same way.
Because you created it. A source you add, a contestation you open, a proposal, a Brief, a question or a discussion is traced for you, marked "automatic" and set to Status only, so you learn when your source is contested without hearing about every note. Automatic traces do not count toward the 500 you can choose, nor in anyone's "Traced by". Stop one like any other, or turn them off in Settings → Notifications → Trace what I create.
Yes: every trace has a level. All lets through every change and the activity around it — notes, citations, mentions, replies. Status only lets through changes of state alone — verified or contested, opened or closed, published, answered, deleted. Silent lets nothing into Changes, but the trace stays in your list and on the map, where its history can still be read. When a change reaches you through two traces, the more open level wins.
The people who trace it. A code written by hand in public text — a post or a reply, the discussion of a source, a thread, an objection, an endorsement, a contestation argument, a verification note — tells them where it was mentioned. Private messages never do, and neither do drafts. A code repeated in one message counts once, even if you remove it and write it again; editing a message counts only the codes you added, and one message notifies about twenty codes at most. In The Masons' Yard, where members report problems with the site itself, codes notify no one.
No. Notifications are about you as a person — a reply to what you wrote, a contestation of your source, an invitation. Traces is what you chose to watch, and it stays on its own page, with a gold dot beside ∴ Traces in the sidebar when something new arrives. For now there are no phone notifications for it.
You and your privacy
Regard replaces "follow". It is an editorial signal — an interest in someone's work — not agreement with their positions. It puts their recent publications on your Desk, and if it is mutual it opens a direct channel between you. There is no feed of friends. To follow a document or a line of enquiry rather than a person, trace it.
Someone you regard back can write to you freely. Anyone else gets exactly one message, which is a request: until you accept it, nothing further can arrive. Ignoring it is a complete defence, and declining is silent — the sender is never told. You can also block, one-sidedly and invisibly, or close messages entirely.
No, deliberately. They are the one thing on Cittadelle with no code, which means they cannot be cited, anchored or introduced as evidence anywhere. There are no read receipts.
Only on your profile and in The Roll. It never appears in a feed, on a post, or beside a verification note — so that a newcomer's well-referenced note outweighs a veteran's assertion. Grades confer no powers at all.
Yes. Settings exports your sources, notes and Briefs as JSON, CSV or Markdown.
Community and philosophy
Any member. You become its first moderator and can invite others to moderate. Moderation is housekeeping — structure, strands, tidiness — never deciding what is true.
Yes, and it stays free. No subscriptions, no advertising, no investors, no data sold. Running costs are covered by voluntary support, and support buys nothing inside the platform — no badge, no visibility, no priority.
Because the mechanism that decides what is established here is the composition of the membership. There is no moderator to correct a drift, by design. That makes admission the real quality control, and the visible chain of who vouched for whom the thing that keeps it honest.
Three ways, none of them a guarantee. Every claim must survive documents that other members can check and contest. Nothing is ranked by engagement, so agreement gains no distribution. And grade is hidden from the feed, so consensus cannot be manufactured by seniority. It remains a real risk, and the honest answer is that it depends on who is invited.
History, geopolitics, war and conflict, intelligence and covert operations, financial networks, law and justice, propaganda and information, economics, political thought. The common thread is that all of them leave documents behind.
A Brief is as close as it gets, and it is explicitly provisional: an argued reading, endorsed by some, open to a better one. Cittadelle establishes what the documents say. What they mean stays open.
