How it works
Useful resources often outlive the places that helped people find them. A forum closes, a directory disappears, a news article gets removed from search, or someone stops maintaining a list. The articles, documents and downloads may still exist, but the path to them is lost.
Hrefuge lets communities keep those paths alive. Each project is a shared collection of links with a name, description and rules. Readers keep their own copies, contribute new links and share the collection with others.
Copies live with the readers
The links are saved in your browser, and you can export a copy as a JSON file. While any Hrefuge page is open, your browser can offer its saved copies to other visitors.
Hrefuge's server helps transfer and validate these copies. It permanently stores the project's description and rules, but keeps no master collection of its links. Copies only pass through it temporarily.
Signed additions, unchanged history
For projects open to contributions, anyone can add links within the rules set at creation. Each submission requires its own email confirmation. Hrefuge checks the existing collection and the proposed additions, then digitally signs the new contribution.
Those signatures protect existing entries from being quietly rewritten. Replacing an old link or removing history required by later contributions makes a copy invalid. This applies even to the project's creator.
Different copies can grow together
If two readers add different links, their collections can be combined, keeping both sets of contributions and including each shared contribution once.
Each signed contribution identifies the earlier history it builds on. This lets copies meet again without overwriting what either reader already holds.
A valid copy may still be older or less complete than another. Its signatures confirm that its records are intact and passed the project's rules, not that the linked material is accurate or safe.
Beyond the original project
Deleting a project from Hrefuge does not erase the copies its readers already hold. If the project disappears or becomes flooded with unwanted additions, someone with an earlier, clean copy can use it to create a new project. The collection continues with a separate history.
Availability depends on people keeping copies. If nobody with a copy is online, visitors may have to wait. If every browser copy and exported file is lost, the server cannot recover the collection. Exports and copies held by other readers help it survive both accidental loss and removal of the original project.
Hrefuge preserves collections of addresses. The websites and files they point to remain with their original hosts.