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Keep the observatory measuring

Palimpsest has no institutional funder. Every signal on this site — the deletion tracker, the Generative Firewall Index, the GDELT and refuge feeds — runs on infrastructure someone has to pay for. If the measurements are useful to you, a contribution keeps them running and makes them better: more vantage points, deeper archives, more models probed, faster refresh.

What a contribution funds

• Vantage points. Differential observation needs eyes in more than one place. Network egress and residential vantage infrastructure is the single largest running cost.
• Archival storage. Deletion as data only works if the original was archived first. Evidence snapshots grow every day and are never thrown away.
• Model probes. The Generative Firewall Index pays per query to probe state-aligned models in two languages against control models.
• Research-grade rigor. Human validation studies, uncertainty bands, and replication packaging so the data holds up in peer review, not just on a dashboard.

Contribute

Contributions are accepted in crypto only. That is deliberate: this project measures censors, and permissionless rails are the ones they cannot lean on. No donor list is kept and nothing is tracked.

Verify the first and last characters after pasting. Send only on the network named on each card; transfers on the wrong network are unrecoverable. Contributions are gifts to an open-source project, not payments for a service, and are not tax deductible.

Other ways to help

• Cite the data. Palimpsest exists to be used. Cite it in research and journalism — method and raw evidence are on the data page.
• Contribute code or validation. The project is MIT-licensed and developed in the open on GitHub. Human coders for the classifier validation study are especially welcome.
• Spread the readings. Every share of a live reading makes the measurement harder to ignore and the commons harder to close.

Free and open-source, developed in the open as a public good. Contributions fund measurement infrastructure only — the project never monetizes the people or topics it observes. The internet stays free because people keep measuring the dark.