Verify us yourself

Forestorers claims your journal never leaves your device unless you choose to share it. That is a testable claim, and you should test it. Every check below takes a few minutes with the tools already built into your browser. You do not need to be a programmer for any of them.

1. Watch the network

Open the app, press F12 (or right-click and choose Inspect), and select the Network tab. Now use the app: write an entry, add a photo, browse around. Watch what appears.

Every request goes to forestorers.org itself. Fonts, images, code: all served from this site, no third-party CDNs.
The only exception is the sync relay (a WebSocket connection), and it only appears if you turn the buddy network on. Leave it off and the app talks to nobody at all after loading.
There are no requests to analytics services, ad networks, or trackers, because there are none in the code.

2. Pull the plug

After your first visit, turn on airplane mode, or use the Network tab's "Offline" setting. Reload the app. Everything still works: your journal, photos, charts, timers. An app that works with no connection cannot be sending your data anywhere. When you install it to your home screen it behaves the same way.

3. Look at your own storage

In the same developer tools, open the Application tab (Storage in Firefox). Under IndexedDB and Local Storage you will find everything the app knows, sitting in your browser. That is the entire database. There is no account and no copy on our servers.

If you have set a password, open the stored values and look: entries and photos are ciphertext, unreadable without your key. That is the at-rest encryption doing its job on your own machine.

4. Read the code

The app ships unminified. What your browser downloads is the readable source, and you can view it right in the Sources tab or with View Source. The client is plain JavaScript with no build step: what you read is exactly what runs. The software is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and inspecting it is encouraged.

5. About the relay

When you connect with a buddy, data is encrypted on your device with keys derived from your pair of identities, then handed to a small relay server for delivery. The relay sees only ciphertext and cannot read any of it. You can verify this two ways: watch the WebSocket frames in the Network tab (encrypted payloads, not readable content), or read the relay code, which ships with the app source. Self-hosting your own relay is supported.

6. The strongest check: run it from a folder

Download the offline copy, unzip it, and you have the whole app on your own disk. Open index.html to browse it, or run a tiny local web server in the folder for the full app (the included README explains how). It runs with the network cable unplugged. A journal that runs from a local folder, offline, with readable source, has nowhere to hide anything, and it is yours to keep even if this site disappears.

If you find a request, a behavior, or a line of code that contradicts what this page says, tell us. That would be a serious bug, and finding it would be a service to everyone who uses this.