A private social network for one family

Most families end up organising themselves in a group chat, and a group chat is a terrible archive. Everything scrolls away. Photos compress to mush. Nobody can find the address that was sent in March, and the one person not on the right app misses half of it.

The alternative most people reach for is a social network, which solves the archive and introduces four new problems: an algorithm deciding which of your relatives you see, advertising sold against your family photographs, a permanent record held by a company with its own plans for it, and the constant low risk of posting to the wrong audience.

Family is the small version with none of that. One board, one member list, no ranking, no ads, and nothing public — there is not a privacy setting to get wrong, because there is no setting. If someone is not in your family, there is no view of it for them to find.

Posts sit in the order they were written and stay findable. Photos are attached to the story that goes with them, which is what makes an album worth keeping at all.

Everything is encrypted on your device before it is sent, under a key generated in your browser and shared only with the people you invite. We store ciphertext and hold no key that opens it. We can see that a family exists and roughly when it is active; we cannot see a single word of it.

One person pays $36 a year and everyone they invite joins free, because a family board with one member on it is worth precisely nothing.