About
Building a social internet on what already works.
The long-term goal of SocialWeb is a social internet that looks more like email and podcasts than like today’s walled gardens — one where you choose your client, your server, and your subscriptions, and no single platform can revoke that choice.
Origin
Why we built this.
Three things bothered us about where the social internet had ended up. First: the algorithm problem. Platforms that optimize for engagement produce feeds that are genuinely bad for the people reading them — not maliciously, just structurally. When attention is the product, calm is a bug.
Second: surveillance as a default. The dominant revenue model for social platforms requires building a detailed picture of each user and selling access to that picture. This isn’t a choice individual companies make; it’s the business model the infrastructure selects for. Building on different infrastructure makes a different outcome possible.
Third: platform lock-in. When your social life lives inside a single company’s walls, that company can change the rules at any time. Email works because no single company owns it. Podcasts work the same way. RSS has been moving information across the internet since 1999. We built SocialWeb on that foundation because it has already proven it can last.
Team
The people building it.
Full bios coming soon.
Brian Hendrickson
Evan Kendig
Ben Martin
Frankie Aguilar
Erik Solano
Cade Nelson
Roadmap
Where we’re going.
Future work, not promises. The order may change; the direction won’t.
Deepen the core experience.
Better stack navigation, offline reading, and a refined mobile layout are on the near-term list. The goal is to make the everyday reading experience feel as polished as any native app — without any of the surveillance.
Make self-hosting simpler.
A one-command installer and better upgrade tooling so that running your own instance is a realistic option for anyone comfortable managing a small server — not just a full-time sysadmin.
Propose the RSS chat extension as an open standard.
The protocol that powers SocialWeb's group chat is already published. The next step is to bring it through a formal standards process so that other apps can interoperate with it — the way any email client can read any email.
Questions, press inquiries, or just want to say hello?
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