Virtual Private Knowledge

A private knowledge base is easy to keep and hard to share. The usual choices are bad ones: open the whole thing to someone you trust, or send them a flattened export that is stale the moment it lands and tells you nothing about what they did with it.

VPK is the third option. You draw a path through your own knowledge — the pages, in the order that teaches them — and that walk becomes the unit you share. It is served live from your own machine, over a private network, to one named peer, for a bounded time, at a chosen fidelity, and every page they read is recorded.

The document never has to leave. A telling of it can go instead.

Why a walk and not a folder

A folder is a set. A walk is a set plus an order, and the order is most of the teaching. "Read these nine pages" and "read these nine pages in this sequence" are different gifts.

It also makes the disclosure legible before it happens: a walk can be drawn, looked at, and argued with. A folder permission cannot.

Where it runs

A local federated wiki farm, shared over a Tailscale tailnet. The tailnet supplies cryptographic peer identity for free — the machine asking is already proven before a byte moves — which is what makes a per-peer grant meaningful rather than aspirational.

See The Pathway for the primitive, and What This Does Not Prove for the honest edges.