loading...
What we believe, what we are building toward, and what we refuse to do.
This is a pro-social platform for pro-social people.
Community leaders get tools and assistance to help them create welcoming and collaborative groups.
Bots and jerks are gonna have a hard time, as they should.
You should be able to find what you need in under five minutes. Discover something good, make a plan, and get out of the app.
We test our intuitions against reality. We listen when people tell us something is not working.
Some of our assumptions will be wrong. Refusing to adjust is the problem.
We check our intuitions with data and (in)validate our hypotheses.
We aim to create a welcoming and inclusive community. But inclusivity also means excluding hate groups due to theparadox of tolerance.
Hateful people are terrible customers anyway. Everyone else is welcome.
Building community is a slow process that requires long-term thinking.
We're here to play the long game and build something sustainable.
circlefinder is 18,000+ different networks, split by area.
The folks you see on here are your neighbors and the community is your actual community.
Social media is social in the same way reality shows are reality. We are aiming for something different.
The goal is to help you find what you need then get you off the app and into a room with real people.
Conversations happen in-group where community norms apply. Scammers cannot hide in DMs. Harassment is easier to spot.
If you need private chat, use Signal. It is great at that.
Social media is built around the attention economy: advertisers bid for your attention, platforms optimize to capture more of it, and the incentives are structurally against you. We think that model is over.
We are building the participation economy instead. You buy a ticket. We take 5%. That is the whole transaction. Your interests, your feed, and your data belong to you.
No sponsored posts. No boosted suggestions. No paid ranking. Free events rank the same as paid events. Always.
We share data with Stripe for payments, and optionally with Google or Apple if you choose to sign in through them. Authentication with email and password is handled entirely in-house. That is the list.
We built our own analytics so we do not need to hand your behavior to Google or Meta.
circlefinder is self-funded and self-built. We own it outright.
Outside investment would push this toward a gig economy model within a few years: higher fees, paid discovery, extraction at every layer. We know how that story ends. We are not writing it.
The structure of this organization is designed to be resilient, principled, independent, and uncompromised. We intentionally aligned our interests with the community so the we succeed when the community succeeds and vice-versa.
Bot reach is structurally limited here. Area and interest scoping means one account cannot spam across 18,000+ areas and 1,000+ interests. The surface is too fragmented.
We scan for bot-like behavior and AI-generated content. Credibility progression is intentionally hard to fake and easy to lose.
We don't share your data with advertisers because we don't use advertising. We use cookies to track your progress and preferences within our engine, and do not share that data. See our privacy policy for more details.