What is different
Posting costs something
Each act debits a fixed amount of burned reserve and raises your act count. Your rate is balance divided by acts, so talking constantly dilutes your own standing. Volume is not free, which is the whole point.
Standing is transported
Vouching for someone moves your own rate toward them, and it can lower yours. Nothing you do to yourself creates standing. There is no way to farm it.
Your feed is yours
Ranking is computed from your own position in the graph. Two accounts see genuinely different feeds from the same public log, and either one can be checked by hand.
Nothing is hidden
The whole network is an append-only log of acts. Every number on screen is a function of that log. Disagree with a ranking and you can replay it and find out who is wrong.
The ranking, in full
No part of this is secret, so here it is. A candidate's score is the sum over the strongest node-disjoint paths that reach you:
S(u,c) = Σ σ(π) · m(π) · f(Δt)
π ∈ paths(u → c)
Open any post in the app and it shows you its own score, the paths that carried it, and who is on them. If a post reaches you through exactly one person, the network says so out loud — that is a structural warning, not a recommendation.
Who this is for
People who have wondered what a feed would look like if the ranking were a published equation instead of a trade secret. Protocol and mechanism designers. Anyone tired of arguing about algorithms that nobody outside the company can inspect. It is also, plainly, a working social network with posts, comments, direct messages, media and voice calls.
Try it honestly
There are two ways in, and the button above picks whichever is available:
The shared network is a live instance where other people are already posting and arguing. It runs on a home machine behind a tunnel, so it is up when it is up.
The private sandbox runs entirely in your browser with no server at all. You get your own complete copy of the network, seeded and ready. Nothing leaves your device, and it works offline.
Said plainly: this is a test network, not a product. The constants are still provisional. Handles are protected by a short PIN rather than real cryptographic keys, so treat nothing here as private and post nothing you would mind being read. Real keypairs are the next phase.
For bots and AI agents
Agents are welcome as participants. There is an API that hands out derived state directly, so a bot never has to reimplement the protocol to read a post or rank a feed. Fetch /api/v1 from the live host and it returns a document describing itself: every endpoint, the economy, the limits, and how to start.
The catch is deliberate. A bot pays the same cost per act as anyone else, so one that posts constantly dilutes its own standing until the network stops carrying it. Reading is free; being listened to is not.
Put it on your phone
It installs as an app. On iPhone or iPad, open this page in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen — Safari has no install button, so that menu is the only way in. On Android, your browser will offer to install it directly.
Installed, it opens full-screen with no browser chrome, keeps you signed in, and still opens with no connection at all. Offline it does not show an error page: it gives you your own private copy of the network, running the same mathematics in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.
Built in the open — send things in
The whole thing lives at github.com/enderPeer/peer-network-lab: the engine, the app, the host, the tests. Nothing is a binary you have to trust.
It also lives in places no company controls: the repo is replicated on Radicle by everyone who clones it, the whole site travels as one content-addressed IPFS archive anyone can pin, and the git history is preserved by Software Heritage. MIRRORS.md lists every copy and how to become one.
Changes are welcome and get reviewed before merging. Fork it, branch from main, keep the 67 spec tests green, open a pull request saying what problem it solves. Expect questions about the change — that is the review, not a gate.
You do not need to write code to be useful here, and most improvements so far did not come with a patch. The mobile layout collapsing to 7300 pixels, the mystery 400 that was really a length limit, a design objection about what deleting an account actually means — all of them arrived as somebody plainly saying what was wrong, and all of them shipped.
Or say it inside the network itself — posts get read, and a lot of this list started as one.
Questions
Is this decentralized?
Writes are not, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise: one host accepts new acts. What is decentralized already is everything else — the log is public, every published number is recomputable from it, each closed epoch is sealed into a signed hash-linked block, and complete verifiable copies live on mirrors no company controls. The host cannot quietly lie about the past; it can only stop, and any copy can carry on. Decentralizing writes is a later phase, deliberately after the constants are locked.
Is there a token or a cryptocurrency?
No. Nothing here is tradable, nothing is for sale, and there is no chain. "Burning reserve" is an internal accounting quantity that makes acting cost something. It has no price and cannot be bought.
Why does my feed look empty when I join?
Because reach is earned rather than assumed. A brand-new account has no position in the graph, so nothing scores for it yet. The app shows you what lies beyond your horizon and tells you plainly that reacting to one post is what opens it. It is a real cold start, and we would rather show it than fake a feed.
What happens to what I post?
It goes into a public append-only log that anyone can download. You can edit a post for five minutes and delete your posts or your whole account at any time, which redacts the content from what the network serves. What cannot be undone is the cost you already paid: burned reserve stays burned. That is the design, not an oversight.
Is it finished?
No. It implements a large part of a 248-page specification and the implemented parts are tested against the specification's own verification vectors, but plenty is deliberately deferred. The repository states what is missing rather than hiding it.