A PublicTxt Project Post
There’s a quiet irony at the heart of the modern web. We have Creative Commons licensing for content - a framework that lets creators share their work openly, on their own terms, with communities who can remix, adapt, and build on it. But the conversation around that content? The commentary, the curation, the collective sense-making? That still belongs to the platform.
Curated Commons is an attempt to fix that. Think of it as Creative Commons for the curation layer.
Most aggregation platforms extract their value from a single point of control. They decide what surfaces, what gets amplified, and whose voice carries weight. Users consume content through whatever lens the algorithm provides. Curators - the people actually doing the work of making sense of information - generate value that flows upward to the platform, not outward to the community.
Even where platforms allow commenting, those comments are locked in. You can’t fork a conversation. You can’t subscribe to a particular curator’s thread across different sources. You can’t remix the curation layer and publish your own view.
Curated Commons borrows its spirit from Creative Commons: open standards, portable content, community ownership. Instead of commentary and curation living inside a centralized platform, they live in plain text repositories - publicly accessible, forkable, subscribable.
This means:
The standard for storing this curation is the W3C Web Annotation standard, extended with PublicTxt syntax. It’s plaintext, Git-backed, and compatible with existing tools like Obsidian - meaning your curated commons is as portable and durable as the content it references.
One of the core commitments of PublicTxt is that infrastructure should be free. Curated Commons inherits this fully. Curation repositories live on free Git hosting - GitHub, GitLab, or anywhere that speaks Git. There’s no subscription, no API key, no platform dependency. Any community can spin up a Curated Commons repository at zero cost and publish their collective interpretation of the web.
This isn’t incidental. It’s the whole point. When infrastructure is free and open, curation becomes a community act rather than a commercial one.
Decentralized curation raises a real question: how do you know whose curation to trust?
[[PublicTxt]]’s community features build reputation from transparent contribution history stored in Git. Every annotation, every edit, every curated collection is versioned and attributable. Reputation emerges from the record of what someone has contributed, not from a score assigned by an algorithm. Communities can weight voices according to their own standards - peer review for research communities, editorial judgment for journalism, consensus mechanisms for open collectives.
No central authority decides whose voice matters. The community does.
Most platforms extract value by controlling aggregation. Curated Commons inverts this: the aggregation infrastructure is owned by the communities doing the work. Open standards mean curated collections remain valuable regardless of which application you use to access them. Git-backed storage means they’re versioned, forkable, and permanent.
Just as Creative Commons returned ownership of creative work to creators, Curated Commons returns ownership of the curation layer to the communities building it.
That’s what PublicTxt is building toward: a web where curation is as open as the content it discusses.
PublicTxt is an open project. Follow along, contribute, or fork the idea.