The sidebar

Talk about any page, from the page

The Yakkery extension opens a sidebar beside whatever you're reading. It shows the page's summary and category, what members are saying about it, similar sites ranked by conversation, and a composer attached to the page. Select text on any page to quote it into a take.

What it will and won't do

• No address leaves your browser until you open the sidebar on that tab, or use "Discuss this page" from the right-click menu.
• The optional conversation count on the icon sends only the first 5 characters of a hash of the page address. The server learns one of about a million buckets, never the page.
• "Who's here" is off by default, only shows people who also turned it on, and disappears 90 seconds after you close the sidebar. It is never stored.
• Page content is never uploaded from your browser. Yakkery's own crawler reads public pages and respects robots.txt.
• You can list sites where the extension never activates. Banks and health portals are on that list from the start.
• It doesn't run in private windows unless you allow it in browser settings, and even then presence and the badge stay off.
• It asks for no "read all websites" permission at install. It reads the current tab only when you open it.

Install from a local build

The store listings are not published yet. To try it from this repository:

pnpm --filter @yakkery/extension build          # Chrome
pnpm --filter @yakkery/extension build:firefox  # Firefox

Chrome or Edge: open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and pick apps/extension/.output/chrome-mv3.

Firefox: open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox, choose Load Temporary Add-on, and pick the manifest.json in apps/extension/.output/firefox-mv2.

Then click the Yakkery icon and sign in. Sign-in happens on this site, and the extension receives its own short-lived token.