// for people who build and run production systems

Reputation you earn,
own, and can prove.

A proof-based reputation network for SREs, platform engineers, security engineers, backend engineers, infra architects, and staff+ engineers. Share postmortems, benchmarks, tool teardowns, and architecture calls that are ranked by usefulness instead of virality.

Invite-only at launch. We're seeding with a small cohort of respected practitioners.

The feed you trust doesn't exist

The work you actually rely on lives scattered across GitHub, Slack threads, vendor blogs, Reddit, and internal wikis. The public feeds meant to surface it now optimize for attention — and they're drowning in AI slop.

~/incident · 03:14 — where do you actually look?

$ search "kafka consumer lag spike after upgrade"

→ 14 SEO blogspam results

→ 1 reddit thread, deleted by user

→ 3 vendor pages selling you something

# the engineer who actually fixed this wrote it up somewhere.

# you will never find it. their reputation is invisible.

$ touchstone search "kafka consumer lag spike after upgrade"

→ verified postmortem · ranked by saves + expert endorsements

→ author: SRE, 9 yrs prod · proof: 2 talks, 40 cited writeups

How Touchstone is different

Three inversions of how mainstream networks work.

// proof, not titles

Reputation is evidence

Link and verify the real work — GitHub, certs, talks, published writeups, production experience. Standing is earned and legible, not self-asserted.

// usefulness, not virality

Ranked by value

Saves, expert endorsements, citations, and quality of discussion drive reach. Engagement bait and unverifiable media get filtered out by policy.

// yours, not ours

Portable & open

Built on AT Protocol: portable identity, inspectable ranking, and no platform lock-in. Your reputation can move with you.

// quality, not frequency

No posting treadmill

One great writeup can outrank a week of someone else's filler. Say something when you actually have something — and still be seen.

Built around the work you already do

Posting isn't a blank box. Structured formats turn real experience into durable, searchable decision support.

Postmortem
Tool teardown
Benchmark + method
Architecture decision
Migration diary
Production demo

What a useful artifact looks like

Touchstone contributions are designed to answer the question another practitioner actually has: what happened, what changed, what evidence supports it, and what should I do next?

verified postmortem · kafka consumer lag after broker upgrade

impact: checkout events delayed 23 min across 4 regions

evidence: metrics snapshot · config diff · rollback timeline

root cause: fetch.max.bytes mismatch surfaced under rebalance load

useful to: kafka · incident response · platform reliability

rank signal: 41 saves · 7 expert endorsements · 3 cited runbooks

Who it's for

We're starting deliberately narrow — practitioners whose technical judgment affects production systems and whose proof of expertise actually matters.

SREs
Platform Engineers
Security Engineers
Backend Engineers
Infra Architects
Staff+ Engineers

Help shape the founding cohort

Invite-only at launch. Get in early, and tell us what you'd post first — the best writeups will seed the network.

No spam. One email when your invite is ready.