Parle

Find public discussions about the page you are reading. Looking them up tells each discussion service the page or site.

Parle shows you what has already been said about the page you are reading. Open an article and Parle looks for public discussion threads about it. If there are any, a small mark appears in the corner of the page with a count. Click it and the discussions open in a panel beside the page: which thread, how many points, how many comments, how long ago, and — where a popular piece was submitted several times — which submission actually got the replies. Click the toolbar button instead and Parle tells you every place it asked and what came back from each, including the places that refused and the places it deliberately did not ask. If a page has never been discussed, Parle adds nothing to it at all. Not an empty panel — nothing. WHAT IT SENDS, AND TO WHOM To find out whether anyone has discussed a page, Parle tells Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky and Lemmy which page you are reading, and tells Lobsters which site it is on. That is the same kind of disclosure as pasting the link into their search boxes. It is not anonymous. Those services see the page or site you are reading. The page's title is not sent — it is used on your machine to label what you are reading, and it stays there. When you open Parle's panel on a page, it also asks the Internet Archive (archive.org) whether a copy of that page has been kept, and Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) whether any article cites it. Both see the address. Neither is asked as you browse — only when you open the panel — unless you deliberately turn on "Open the archived copy instead of the page" in settings, which sends every page you open that is not skipped to archive.org as you open it, and says exactly that above the switch. It is off until you turn it on. The panel also shows what named public raters say about a page's publisher. That is looked up in a file that ships inside the extension, so it sends nothing anywhere. By default this happens on every page you open except the ones Parle skips. Parle asks you which way you want it on the very first screen, before it has sent anything anywhere — and until you answer that question, no address leaves your browser at all. Choose "Only when I ask" and nothing about the pages you read is ever sent as you browse; the toolbar button still looks up any page on demand. In either mode, Parle also fetches one small static file at most once a day — a skip-list update from its own public code repository, identical for every install and carrying nothing about you or your pages. Parle skips banks, webmail, AI chats, health, government, adult sites, social feeds, and private or internal addresses, plus addresses that visibly carry a token or a credential. It never sends the part of an address after the "#", and it strips tracking parameters before sending. That is a list. It is incomplete, it will miss things, and it cannot see a private share link that looks like an ordinary address. It is a floor, not a guarantee. You can read it, add to it, override any entry, pause Parle on any site, and switch automatic lookups off entirely. THREE THINGS PARLE WILL NOT CLAIM - Not "your browsing is private". It is not. Every page you read that is not skipped produces requests carrying enough of its address to identify the page or site. - Not "we exclude addresses carrying credentials". The rules catch several common shapes. A short share link that looks like an ordinary address cannot be detected at all. - Not "we protect sensitive categories". A list of sites cannot cover health, internal company tools or documents, and the best lists available are measurably missing well-known providers. Those three sentences are also inside the extension, on the first screen and on the settings page. Nothing here was written for the store and softened in the product. SUMMARIES, IF YOU WANT THEM Finding discussions needs no AI and never will. Summarising them does, and you supply it. Connect a Provider on the settings page — an API key of your own (OpenAI, or anything speaking the same shape, including a model running on your own machine), or your browser's built-in model where it has one — and the panel offers a Digest. A Digest never happens on its own. The panel first tells you exactly how many discussions would be read and where their comments would be sent. Only then does the button do anything. Every statement in a Digest links to the specific comment it came from, and a statement that cannot be traced to a comment is discarded rather than shown. With no Provider connected, everything else still works. There is no upsell wall. WHAT IS ON YOUR DISK Your settings — and, if you connected a Provider with an API key, that key, as ordinary text. A browser extension has nowhere private to put a key; Manifest V3 offers nothing better than the store every other setting goes in, so anything that can read your browser profile can read it. The settings page says so where you paste it. Use a key you can revoke. And what supported discussion sites showed you: while you are on one of those sites, Parle notes the links on the page you are already looking at and which thread each came from. That is why a link you click there can already have its thread attached before the page finishes loading, with no new request to anyone. It never leaves your machine. One button clears it. And the downloaded skip-list update: the daily static skip-list file and the time it was fetched, kept so a fresh start uses the newest list without refetching. Identical for every install; says nothing about you. "Forget everything" deletes it along with the rest. WHAT PARLE DOES NOT DO - There is no server of ours. This project runs none. The one project-hosted download is a small static skip-list update, at most once a day, from the extension's own public code repository — identical for every install and carrying nothing about you. No account, nothing to sign up for. - No ads, no trackers, no analytics, no telemetry. Nothing about you reaches the people who wrote this, because there is nowhere for it to arrive. - Parle does not read the content of the pages you visit. It uses the address, and the tab title which the browser hands it directly and which never leaves your machine. On supported discussion sites only, it reads that site's own links and scores, and keeps only those pointers and numbers. - X is not a search source in this build. On x.com, Parle only notes links already visible on the page, stores them locally, and sends X nothing. OPEN SOURCE Every line is AGPL-3.0-only and public: https://github.com/ziahamza/parle-extension STATUS Early, and honest about it. Some integrations work end to end; others may refuse or rate-limit requests. Parle reports a refusal as refused, never as "nothing found", because those are opposite facts. An offline list that would let Parle skip asking about pages nobody has discussed is not built yet, and the toolbar says so in as many words rather than leaving you to guess.