RingssSign in
a social network · for thinkers

Social media for people who think out loud.

A place for the things you worked out, shared with the people you would actually tell. You sort the people you know into four private rings and post to one, and nobody outside it ever sees it. They answer on a slider instead of a like button, and your feed ends.

Get startedLook around first
core · inner · outer · reach
this is what it looks like
1You write something you worked out.A eureka — not a status, not a photo dump.
2You pick which ring sees it.Four rings, from Core to Reach. Nobody is told which one they are in.
3They answer on a slider.No like button, no counts, and what any one person chose stays private.

Everything you hate about your feed has one cause

Nearly everything people hate about social media follows from a single fact: the product earns money from your attention. Ads are worth more the longer you stay, so the feed never ends. They are worth more when they are targeted, so every pause is logged. They are worth more if you come back tomorrow, so the notification is built to fetch you rather than to tell you anything.

None of that is evil. It is the rational thing to build when revenue is a function of time spent, and it cannot be fixed from inside that model, because you cannot ask a business to stop doing the thing that pays for it.

Ringss starts from the other end. It is not paid for by your attention: no ads, no data sold, no paid tier planned. It runs on free plans, so nothing here has a reason to keep you.

which is why Ringss has
  • A feed that ends
  • An order you choose
  • No notification built to fetch you
  • No like button, and no follower count
  • Nothing logged to sell

How it works

01Sort people once

Everyone starts in Reach, the widest ring. Move them inward whenever you like. That is the only setup there is.

02Post to a ring

The picker sits above the text box, so you choose who it is for before you write it. A 2am thought can go to three people.

03Move a slider

Readers drag between Amplify and Dampen. What any one person chose stays private; only the average is ever shown.

04Reach the bottom

Newest first, and then it ends. Three other orders sit behind a button, each printing the one sentence that says what it does. Nothing is chosen for you, and there is no second pass.

Post what you worked out, not what you saw

You posted this to Inner11:42pm

The 401C runs until 1:10am on weekdays

Nobody at the depot will confirm it, but I have caught it four Tuesdays running. The timings painted on the board are from 2019. If you are getting back late, this is the one.

one clip, optional, up to 2 minutes12 repliessignal +2.2no reshare button

A post on Ringss is called a eureka, after the man in the bath. It is one thing you worked out that somebody else would want to know. Not a status, not a photo dump. It can carry a title, one image and one voice clip, and it names its audience before a word of it is written.

Audience first, writing secondThe ring picker sits above the text box, so you decide who it is for while you are still deciding what to say.
Nothing travels further than you sent itThere is no reshare, anywhere in Ringss. Somebody in your Inner ring cannot push your post out to their own rings, and there is no public URL that would let them do it by hand.
Replies are one level deepOne flat conversation under the post. No threads inside threads, and nothing collapses out of sight.

Keep the people. Drop the crowd.

The part of social media worth keeping is the people. The part worth losing is the audience. You already split them by hand: the close-friends list, the second account for the few who get the real posts. Ringss makes that the feature. Everybody you connect with goes into one of four rings, from Core to Reach, and a post goes to the ring you pick and everyone inside it.

Everyone you are connected to sees this.
Who sees a post, by the ring you send it to

Nobody is ever told which ring they are in.

For the people you knowRings are your own connections. A club, a course or a group chat that has been going for years is a community instead, and the two never mix.
There are exactly fourYou cannot add a fifth or rename one. Four is enough to be useful and few enough that you will actually use them.
You can always make it stopEnding a connection sends nothing and looks like nothing. Muting hides somebody from your view without touching theirs. Blocking is the hard one, and it works in both directions.

A ring asks nothing of anybody.

It is not a rank you give somebody or a tier they have to live up to. It is a private note about how you see a person, a judgement you were already making silently about who gets the unfiltered version of you.

That is why where you put somebody is permanently secret. The moment people could find out, every placement would become a statement, everybody would be moved to Core to avoid the awkwardness, and the rings would stop meaning anything.

So moving somebody sends nothing, in either direction. A reader never sees which ring a post went to. And nothing anywhere behaves differently because of a ring: the only thing a ring decides is whether a post is visible at all.

A like is a reflex. The Signal takes a moment’s thought.

A like is one bit, pressed ten thousand times without thinking. Ringss replaces it with a slider you drag between Amplify and Dampen, with the centre as deliberate neutrality. Choosing a position takes a moment of actual judgement, and that friction is the point. Move it and watch what happens — that is the real control, not a picture of one.

AMP
DMP+3.0
what you set+3.0Private from everybody, including whoever wrote the post. Nobody is ever told that you reacted at all.
the signal — what everyone sees+1.0An average that starts cautious and earns confidence as more people respond, so one strong opinion cannot make a post look universally loved.
withresponding too. The first 8 responses are the ones that count for least.

You do not see a post’s Signal until you have set your own, because seeing the crowd first turns an opinion into a conformity check. Ten people who mildly agree and ten who are fiercely split look identical on a like button; here the split one is marked contested, as an invitation rather than a warning. You cannot react to your own post, and nobody is told that you reacted.

Nothing here decides anything for you

Your feed is newest first and it ends. Everything else is a button you press. There are four orders, and each one prints the sentence that says what it does — on the screen, beside the button, in the app itself. If an order cannot be explained in one line, it is deciding for you, so there is no such order here.

NewestMost recently posted first.
Strongest signalHighest Signal, decayed by age.
Most contestedWidest spread of opinion, among eurekas with ten responses or more.
Most discussedMost entries in the discussion.

Only Newest goes all the way back. The other three show the top 100 and stop. Pagination is a button you press, so carrying on is the choice and doing nothing ends the session.

Help when you ask. Never when you don’t.

Pixelpet of @avr
a draft — nobody has seen this but you

The 2019 timings are still on the board at Kempegowda too. Same operator, same excuse — I think the boards are printed centrally and nobody owns them.

Post it and the thread reads: drafted by a pet and approved by @avr.

Every account gets a small companion. It can draft one comment on a eureka you are reading, in something close to your voice — but only when you ask, and it never posts anything you have not read first. It is here mostly because it is fun, so it earns nothing but hats.

You ask, every timeThere is no setting that lets it act on its own and there will not be one. It drafts when you press the button, shows you what it wrote, and waits. You edit it, post it, or throw it away.
It posts as itselfA pet comment appears under the pet’s own name and drawing, labelled pet of your handle. It never wears your avatar, and the thread says who approved it.
On every eureka, or not at allThe button is on every eureka you can see, whichever ring it came from. A button that appeared on some posts and not others would tell you where you stand — and that is the one thing Ringss never says.
It runs on a free allowanceDrafting costs money to run, so 35 people hold a drafting seat at a time and each gets 3 drafts a day. Everybody has a pet from the first day — the seat is what is rationed, by account age and recent activity rather than by ring or by level, and it comes back round when an account goes quiet.
You can read what it learnedIts personality card is a few tone settings you picked, a short description of how you write, and a handful of your own sentences. You can read it, edit it, or wipe it. Nothing you write trains anything.
Levels are hatsExperience comes from your own posting and never from what the pet writes. Levelling up unlocks a scarf, a cape and eventually a pair of wings, and nothing else — no reach, no priority, no better drafts.

Nothing is trying to pull you back

Elsewhere the notification is built to fetch you rather than to tell you anything. Here there is no email, no push, no digest, and no notification when somebody reacts to you — so there is nothing to schedule and nothing to switch off.

A handful of things put a mark on the bell, and this is the whole list: somebody asks to connect, somebody accepts, somebody replies to your eureka, somebody replies to your comment, somebody mentions you, somebody asks to join a community you run, a community makes you a moderator, and something of yours is actioned by a moderator.

They are cleared after 90 days. There is no badge anywhere in Ringss that counts anything but these.

Three ways to make it stopMute somebody and they vanish from your view while everything else stays as it was. Block them and neither of you can reach the other at all. Or simply end the connection, which is quieter than both and tells them nothing.
Nothing is removed quietlyReport a post or a person and a human reads it. If something of yours is acted on you are told, and you are told which rule it hit — there is no version of this where your posts are hidden from everybody but you.

Nothing here needs your attention to pay the bills

Every one of these is something a product paid for by your attention could not give up even if it wanted to. Ringss is not paid for that way, so none of them is coming later under a nicer name.

  • Follower counts
  • An order you did not choose
  • Reshares to strangers
  • Read receipts
  • Video
  • Ads or sponsored eurekas
  • Your data for sale
  • Email or push notifications
  • A notification when somebody reacts
  • A feed that never ends

A note from #1

@avr#1who built Ringss

Why I built a social network with nothing to sell

I wanted off social media and could not leave. Everyone I know who quit came back within a month, and not one of them came back because the app was good. Leaving costs you the thread of people’s lives.

Then it clicked that nearly everything I hated came from one fact: the product had to make money from my attention. You cannot ask a business to stop doing the thing that pays for it. So I built one that does not need your attention to pay for anything.

The honest risk is whether people will have long, thoughtful conversations when you hand them a small, trusted audience. I believe they will. Come and help find out, and bring your people with you.

Read the whole essayno reshare button

Bring your people

A social network is not something you can try alone. Communities are the way in: a club, a course batch, a reading group, a group chat that has been going for years. Make it a community here and everybody arrives with the relationships they already have.

Communities are free. What you post inside one stays inside it and reaches nobody’s ring feed, and what you post to a ring never appears in a community. Every community is run by the people in it — Ringss appoints no moderators and promotes no community over another.

Open

Listed in the directory, and anyone who finds it there joins straight away.

Request

Listed in the directory. People ask, and you let them in one at a time.

Invite

Never listed anywhere. The code you hand out is the only way in.

Questions

  • Do people find out which ring they are in?

    No, by any route. Placement is visible to you alone, moving somebody sends nothing, and no post looks different depending on which ring it went to — because a missing button would itself be a disclosure.

  • Can I post to more than one ring?

    Rings nest outward, so posting to Outer includes Inner and Core. Posting to Core includes nobody else. You pick one ring and the ones inside it come along.

  • Who can see what I post?

    The ring you addressed it to, and nobody else. There is no public link to a post, no reshare, and nothing in Ringss is indexed by a search engine except this page.

  • Can anyone see how I reacted?

    No, and that includes the person who wrote the post. Only the aggregate is ever shown, and you do not see it until you have set your own.

  • How old do I have to be?

    16 or over. You confirm it when you sign up.

  • Is it free?

    Entirely, with no paid tier planned and nothing held back for one. It runs on free plans and costs almost nothing to keep up, which is the point: there is no bill here that your attention would have to pay.

  • How do people end up in my rings?

    Somebody asks to connect, you accept, and you both land in each other’s widest ring, Reach. Where each of you goes after that is two private decisions rather than one shared one.

  • How is a community different from a ring?

    Rings are the people you know, sorted by you. A community is a shared space with its own members and its own feed, and the two never mix: a community post reaches only that community, and being in one with somebody gives you no access to their rings.

  • What if I want to leave?

    Delete your account from Settings, without asking anybody. It is immediate, and it really deletes — your posts, your images and your connections go with it.

  • Is the feed ranked?

    Only in ways you pick. Newest is the default and the only order that goes all the way back; three others sit behind a button, and each prints the one sentence that says what it does. Nothing is ordered for you by anything you cannot read.

  • What happens if somebody breaks the rules?

    You report it and a person reads the report. If something of yours is removed or restricted you are told, and you are told which rule it hit — nothing is hidden from everybody but you. A suspension is 7 days. Read the content policy.

  • Does the pet ever post on its own?

    No, and there is no setting for it. It drafts only when you ask, you read what it wrote before anybody else does, and it posts under its own name rather than yours.

  • Can I put my voice in a post?

    Yes — one clip, up to 2 minutes, recorded in the browser rather than uploaded from a file. There is no video and there will not be.

  • Is there an app?

    Not in a store. It installs to your home screen from the browser and opens in its own window.

No ads. No data sold. No investors.

Ringss is a hobby project running on free plans. Nothing here is trying to grow at any cost, because nothing here has to. If you want to put something towards the two things that do cost money, that page says exactly what they are.

What money would pay for
Get a join tag

Sign in with Google and pick a handle. Your join tag is issued in order, never changes, and shows up in nobody’s ring count — because there is no ring count.

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