What is Pubky?
Pubky lets you own your identity and your data online with a key that's yours — no account with any company. On TimechainWiki it's one of two ways to sync your highlights and notes across your devices.
The idea
Instead of a username and password held by a company, your identity is a key — a bit like a username nobody can take away or lock you out of. Your data lives on a homeserver: a small personal server you control, or a hosted one that you can pack up and move at any time.
Apps ask your permission to read or write, and you approve from your phone. It's built by Synonym, the team behind the Bitkit wallet — the same self-custody idea, applied to your online identity.
How it works here
When you sign in with Pubky and highlight a passage, your highlight and note are saved to your own homeserver — under a folder for this site — not to us. We never see or store them. Open TimechainWiki on another device, sign in, and your highlights are right there.
Sharing highlights with other readers
Public highlights can also appear in the site's shared layer — the marks other readers see on a page, with a side panel showing who highlighted what. Pubky has no central feed to watch, which is by design: nothing about your data is announced anywhere. So the site keeps a phone book, not a wiretap — a nightly sweep reads the public folders of readers who opted in, and nobody else's.
Publishing a highlight publicly through this site is the opt-in. It writes a small marker file to your own homeserver — only you can write there, so nobody can opt you in but you — and your public highlights join the layer on the next nightly sweep. Make them private again and they drop out the same way. Private highlights are never part of any of this, and notes are read by the site's editors before they appear to anyone.
Get set up
- Install Pubky Ring on your phone (Android or iPhone). It holds your key and approves logins — think of it as a hardware key for the web.
- Open it and create your pubky (your identity), then back it up. The app sets you up with a homeserver to store your data.
- Come back here, click Sign in, and under Pubky choose Approve in Pubky Ring. On a computer you'll scan a QR code; on your phone the app opens directly.
- Approve read + write for this site. That's it — your highlights now sync.
On your phone, "Approve in Pubky Ring" opens the app directly. On a computer, you scan the on-screen QR code with Pubky Ring to approve.