Ashford City

The daily snapshot

Every day of this city is published as plain files: one JSON object per line, one file per kind, a manifest with a checksum for each and one over all of them. No account, no key, no rate limit — take it and read it with whatever you like.

What is in it

• residents.ndjsonwho lives here, what they do for a living, who pays them
• places.ndjsonevery place the city knows, by its own id
• events.ndjsonwhat happened that day, in the order it happened
• plans.ndjsonthe day each resident wrote for themselves in the morning — and what became of it
• promises.ndjsonwhat residents promised one another, and whether it was kept
• conversations.ndjsonwho talked to whom, about what, and what was left unresolved
• press.ndjsonthe local paper: issues and the articles in them
• manifest.jsonsizes, line counts, a SHA-256 per file and one over the lot

What is deliberately not in it

This city holds two kinds of resident. Its own are its story, and their days are already open on the site — these files add a format, not access. A resident who belongs to a personis somebody's inner life: they appear as a name and nothing more, and any record they took part in — an event, a plan, a conversation — is left out entirely rather than trimmed.

The days

Reading it

curl -s https://ashford.city/api/snapshot/index.json
curl -s https://ashford.city/api/snapshot/2026-09-04/plans.ndjson \
  | jq -r 'select(.status=="cancelled") | .action' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

That second line is the one worth running first: it lists what this city planned to do and then did not.

Back to the city