Welcome to the Lodestar

So. Somebody you trust gave you a link and told you to click it.

This is, perhaps, the one and only time that doing so is a good thing. Welcome, new friend, to the landing page of The Lodestar. You may or may not have heard of us – some folks talk about us pretty openly and our public pages do have a large spread of information. We’re not going to make any assumptions, so if you know who we are and what we’re about then you can skim the next few paragraphs. If not, then read away.

Might save your life one day.

This is The Lodestar. History lessons have their own page on how we got started and all of that business, what you need right now is to know what we do. We share information. Often this is information that’s difficult for everyday folk to get to or that places are actively trying to suppress – once we’ve verified what we’ve got, that information always goes directly to the people.

All people, not just members. Some Feeds try to restrict access to us, so we do encourage making an account and looping in your friends once you’ve got enough trust rep built up to generate your own link. Each link works once.

In the end we’ve got to protect The Lodestar. People deserve to know what’s going on – sometimes an arcane storm is the result of an experiment gone wrong and folks deserve to know the truth and also know what to expect. Sometimes the rain starts falling upward and you need to know if you’re the only one seeing this. The account system exists to make it easier for folks to gain access to The Lodestar and keep it (we have our own Feed!), as well as allow us to vet who joins and make sure it’s not someone trying to figure The Lodestar out so they can try to shut it down. You know as well as we do that a lot of places want to keep everything under wraps until it’s too late.

With The Lodestar, that’s not happening.

More often than not during an emergency you don’t have time to search for a dozen things in the Feed. That’s why we’re here. We’ve got various emergency breakdowns you can find in the sidebar to your left, and an active forum where you can post a call for help and folks will answer. Someone may even be in your area and willing to come help.

Accounts are anonymized by default. You can opt out of this if you want, but know that once you have opted out of it – there’s no going back. Opted out individuals often do so because they want others to know that they’re here to help when calls for rescue or assistance are made. On very very rare occasions the mod team reserves the right to de-anonymize an account. So far we’ve done this four times, once because it was mentioned in a users will and thrice because the users in question were revealed and confirmed to be dangers to other people. Likewise, we reserve the right to terminate accounts as needed.

We don’t want to have those clauses, but events have proven we need them.

Your short version is here: The Lodestar exists to ensure people have information that may keep them safe. We don’t care who you are or where you’re from, unless you turn out to be a serial killer or serial rapist or whatever – in which case we will warn others about you.

Look to The Lodestar for safety.