Present
Present, as in the here and now.
Your feed used to be your friends. Then the apps started choosing what you see, and they chose whatever kept you scrolling.
It worked. You scrolled longer, so they gave you more content, and the feed stopped having a bottom.
Then the junk arrived. If all that matters is holding your attention, it doesn't matter who made the content, or whether a person made it at all. So feeds filled up with reposts, recycled clips, and AI content, made faster than any person could keep up with.
And the junk kept getting better at its job. To win the algorithm, content has to hold your attention better than everything else, so what survives is the hardest thing to ignore.
More junk means more sorting. More sorting means the junk has to get more addictive.
The cycle just keeps going.
Your friends are still in there somewhere.
Every post on Present is sealed by the hardware that captured it, at the moment it was captured. Today that means the camera in this app, because that is the only way to do it that works right now. In time it will mean more than that: phones and cameras that sign their own captures, a proper lens on a proper camera. The circle gets wider as the hardware catches up. What never gets in is anything that can't show where it came from.
The only reason anything appears in front of you is that someone you know posted it, or is in it. No ranking, no recommendations, no suggested accounts, no topics to follow, no popular tab. Just your friends, and their friends if your friends are tagged.
Most apps treat a post as something belonging to one account. Here it belongs to the moment. It sits on the profile of everyone in it, with the person who captured it credited.
Every connection here goes both ways or not at all. No followers, no influencers, no one-way anything. Nobody is performing for a crowd, because there isn't one.
You will reach the end. Every day. It's just what happens when a feed contains only your friends and isn't designed to keep you there any longer than you need to be.
Because we don't think social media belongs in anyone's life younger than that, even without the junk.
There are no ads on Present, and your data is not for sale. We don't sell what you look at, who you know, or where you've been. If ads ever exist here, they'll be marked as ads and sit apart from your friends.
We only prove one thing. That a post was captured live, on real hardware, and has not been altered since. Anyone can check it, at a link, without an account.
We do not prove that the moment was what it looked like. A real photo or video of a staged scene still verifies, because it really was captured. We verify capture, not context.
We share metadata about the post, like the time it was taken and its location, and we run checks on that data to see if it looks real, warning you if anything looks unusual. Some of this can be faked. The record page confirms the capture, and lets you judge the rest for yourself.
Present, as in the here and now. Capturing and sharing are the same act, so what your friends see is the moment you are in, while you are still in it. You are present with them, and they with you.
The logo is two rings of dots around a centre, inspired by the way Aboriginal art has long drawn community: concentric circles for a meeting place, meaning people gathered around it. The centre is you. The inner ring is your friends. The outer ring is their friends, the people whose posts reach you when your friends are in them.
That is also the whole app. Your own small patch of world, and nothing beyond it.
The green is eucalyptus. Present is built near Flynns Beach in Port Macquarie, a stone's throw from the Pacific, and the palette comes from outside the window: gum leaves, dry grass, pale morning sky, and the white of the spray. The touches of colour belong to the locals: galah pink, lorikeet orange, rosella crimson.
I'm Brian. I'm building Present in Port Macquarie, on Birpai Country, in the first country to decide that social media isn't for children.
I'm not building this to get as many people on it as possible. There is a well-worn way to do that, and it involves an algorithm, an infinite feed and copious amounts of junk and AI slop.
I'd rather build something real. For you and your friends.
If that sounds like something you want, there's a way in.
