only-text.com / for press

In one paragraph

only-text.com is a website that holds exactly one sentence at a time. Whoever typed last owns the page, and anyone can take it from them without making an account. What you are reading at any moment is one person somewhere in the world and what they chose to say when they had the only slot on it. Every sentence gets a guaranteed minimum time on the front page, so nobody can be wiped out before they have been read, and when it is busy a queue forms with a visible position. Everything ever typed stays in a public archive, each with the country it came from and how long it stood.

In forty words

A website that is one sentence long. It belongs to whoever typed last, anyone can take it, and what is on it is whatever a stranger somewhere in the world decided to say. No accounts, no advertising, no images at all.

Numbers you can check yourself

13 sentences from 10 writers so far. The longest any sentence has survived is 16d 15h; the median is 22h 23m. Live figures are on the numbers page and as JSON. Nothing is rounded up.

You may use all of it

Every screenshot, every share card and every archived sentence on this site may be reproduced without asking, including commercially. No embargo, no approval, no request to be sent a link afterwards. If you want a specific sentence rendered as an image, every permanent link has one at only-text.com/api/og/<id>.

How it is moderated

Slurs aimed at where someone is from, what they believe, who they love or what their body does are blocked, along with threats and links. Ordinary swearing is not. The filter is plain logic rather than a language model, so a sentence appears the instant you press enter. Every sentence can be reported and three reports take it off the front page immediately, before anyone reviews it. Nothing is ever deleted from the archive except by moderation.

What is logged

No advertising and no tracking cookies. IP addresses are never stored: the database holds a one-way hash of the address with a server-side secret mixed in, used only to stop one person from holding the page. Country is kept as a two-letter code so a sentence can say where it came from. Visits are counted in that same database, by this site, and there is no third-party analytics anywhere on it.

Why it exists

Every feed is built the same way: room for everything, so post more. Everyone talks at once and nothing stays. This is the opposite arrangement. There is one slot. Filling it takes one sentence and no account, and the only thing you earn is time on a page that is yours until somebody wants it more.

That constraint changes what gets written. When there is room for everything, you post. When there is room for one thing and a stranger is about to take it, you think first. What ends up on the front page is shorter, odder and more deliberate than a feed produces, and the archive is a record of what people say when saying it costs them something.