Circles

Hey Product Hunt, with a big thanks to @johnjoubert for hunting (and help along the way)! First time posting here! The reason I’m posting is that now we’re live, I thought I’d share the product I’ve been building in hopes it resonates with people like myself. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends. I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way. In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today (I also know how much the PH crew miss Path 😜). So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design, one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born. The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your closest contacts into Circles to define what the relationship is about. You must do this to share to or see from anyone. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers). It also takes cues from other privacy focused products. Posts are encrypted (currently at rest), reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with each other, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile. As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads. We’d love to hear what Product Hunt thinks! We want to make products you want to use, so please let us know what you’d like to see in the comments.

👋 Hey Product Hunters! I’m honored to be able to share this brilliant app, built by my good friend @jamesstirrat. Circles is the social media app I’ve always wished existed. Circles is privacy focused (no ads), built to work the way real life works, and it helps bring you closer to your nearest and dearest friends and family. Give it a try today! 🎉

thanks for sharing - will download soon!