The shape of connection.
worldhello is a single link that grows. Share it, and every person who joins through you — and everyone they bring — becomes part of a living web you can watch travel across the planet in real time. It's a small experiment in seeing something usually invisible: the chain of who brought who.
Why it exists
Most of the internet measures you. Pixels, profiles, ad IDs — built to follow a person across the web and tie everything back to a name. worldhello is the opposite bet: that you can build something genuinely social and viral without knowing who anyone is. No account, no name, no email required. Just the shape of how people reach each other.
The idea rides on an old one — that everyone alive is roughly six handshakes apart. Every link you share is one of those handshakes, made visible.
How your privacy is preserved
These aren't promises in a policy — they're how the system is actually built:
No sign-up, no name, no email. A device joins and participates fully without ever identifying a person. Email is optional and only used to link your own devices together.
You're recognized by a random per-device ID plus a privacy-preserving fingerprint — enough to keep your web yours across visits, never enough to know who you are. The fingerprint is used only to reconnect you to your own chain and to keep bots out — never to track you across other sites. You can erase it below at any time.
Fingerprints and IP addresses are never stored in the clear. They're passed through a keyed one-way hash, so the database holds opaque tokens that can't be reversed back to a device or network.
The globe places you at an approximate, jittered city-level point derived from your connection — never your precise location, and you are never prompted for it. Your browser's location permission is never requested.
No third-party ad pixels, no cross-site trackers, no behavioral profiling, and no analytics SDK. The only data captured is the shape of the referral graph itself.
Each node stores only what the visualization needs: a share code, a referrer link, a coarse location, and a few counts. Sensitive signals live in a separate append-only table that can be dropped without affecting the web.
Who referred you is written once and never rewritten. No silent re-parenting, no inflating the graph — the connections you see are the connections that happened.
Automated traffic, crawlers, and link-preview bots are detected and excluded from the network, so reach numbers reflect real people, not scripts.
What we keep, and for how long
Personal signals — the keyed hashes of your fingerprint and IP, your user agent, and bot verdicts — live in a separate append-only table used only for abuse defense, and are dropped on the schedule below rather than kept forever. Your anonymous node (a share code, a referral edge, a coarse location, and a few counts) persists as long as the web exists, because descendants' chains hang off it.
You can erase your device's personal data at any time — no email, no account, no support ticket. It's keyed to your browser, so do it from the device you want scrubbed.
Open source
worldhello is built in the open. The privacy claims above are verifiable because the code that makes them is public — featured on osbytes.