authentic media — a social site
what it is
authentic media (app.jacobrosenbacher.com) is a social media site i built from scratch and run entirely at the fastly edge — there is no origin server. three things make it the opposite of normal social media. (1) no algorithm — the feed is strictly reverse-chronological. every post appears in the order it was published, and nothing you didn't ask for. no recommendation engine, no 'for you', no engagement optimization. (2) anti-bot — every visitor is fingerprinted at the edge from signals a bot can't easily fake: the ja4 tls handshake, the http/2 fingerprint, header ordering, and dozens of browser traits. those get scored into a plain human / bot / spoofed verdict before anything renders. a visitor whose claimed location, tls handshake, and ancient browser don't add up gets flagged as spoofed. (3) citations — every post can carry its sources. a citation engine automatically pulls references from wikidata, wikipedia, and crossref and attaches them, so claims are checkable instead of taken on faith. video is even hosted and transcoded on-site (adaptive streaming, auto-captioned) so creators never have to hand their work to a platform that will feed it to strangers.
why it matters
today's social media optimizes for engagement, which rewards outrage and is filling every feed with ai slop and bot accounts. authentic media is the structural opposite — chronological, bot-resistant, and source-backed — so you get a quieter, more honest version of the same idea: what real people you actually chose said, in order, with their receipts attached.