Freedback

Everything deserves feedback — especially when people are impacted.

▶ Try the live widgets Read the White Book Source on GitHub

See it in action

What it is

We can't force every organization to open a feedback channel — so we make our own. Freedback is a federated, open protocol for attaching feedback — stars, scalar ratings, thumbs, comments, tags — to anything with a URI. Each entry is a standard W3C Web Annotation, published to a server you choose and aggregated across servers. No central gatekeeper.

And your feedback is yours. You sign it with your own portable key, so it is never locked inside the silo that collected it. Only you can edit it. Only you can delete it — and deletion really erases. Queries follow subjects, not people: we aggregate opinions about things, we don't build profiles of users.

This doesn't depend on everyone adopting it at once. A federated protocol only matters once a critical mass shows up — so Freedback is built to be worth using today, one project at a time, before that mass ever arrives: a widget you drop into an existing page, a feedback form that exports clean standard data, a wire format existing annotation tools already read. We also prefer standards over invention wherever one already exists — Web Annotations, JSON-LD, schema.org, SHACL — so almost nothing here is proprietary to Freedback itself. The federation is the long game; each individual use has to earn its keep now, on its own.

Want the whole story — the vision, the architecture, and the reasoning behind every design decision? Read through the docs.

Feedback on Freedback

We dogfood: the software we ship to collect feedback collects feedback about the project itself — right here, for real.

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Protocol artifacts (stable URLs)