A time-capsule interface for events worth looking back at.

The internet remembers a lot. It just doesn't remember it in one place. To understand a single event — what happened, how it unfolded, what people said at the time, how the press covered it, why it mattered — you usually have to assemble that yourself across ten browser tabs, three of which are paywalled and one of which takes you to a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2014.

Recap.at exists to assemble those tabs into a single page, for as many events as we can reach. Each recap is built from structured public sources: Wikidata for entities and dates, Wikipedia for prose, the Wayback Machine for archived web, GDELT for global news coverage, and the major social platforms for the public reactions of the time.

The product is not a blog. It is not a Wikipedia clone. The individual sources are richer than anything we'd write — our job is to compose them into something coherent, fast, sourced, and readable, with the editorial discipline to know what to leave out.

Where this is

Right now you're looking at the bones — a small set of hand-curated recaps that prove the page shape works. The connectors that pull from Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wayback, and the news archives are next. After that, the social layer (X, Reddit, YouTube) for events that have one.

We keep our roadmap and architecture public in the repo. The schema is in infra/supabase/migrations/0001_init.sql. The connector contracts are in docs/CONNECTORS.md. The phased plan is in ROADMAP.md.

What we don't do

We do not become a re-distribution platform for content we don't own. The social layer stores IDs, metadata, and short excerpts with hashed handles for ordinary accounts; verified or official accounts are attributed by name. Media is hot-linked from its source CDN. Every claim on every page traces back to a source row you can click. The full storage policy is ADR 0009.

Why this name

recap.at — "recap" for the verb, ".at" because we wanted the domain. The Austrian TLD happens to be the kind of small structural pun that makes a brand memorable.