A nonprofit social platform
A nonprofit platform built for intention, not addiction. Designed to serve you, not to profit from you.
The problem
You feel it every day. The endless scroll. The ragebait that hijacks your mood. Feeds you can't control, filled with content you never asked for. Outrage that travels faster than truth. None of that is a glitch. It's the product working exactly as intended.
Every major platform runs on the same business model: keep you watching, sell your attention, answer to investors. They're for-profit companies, and the way a free app makes money is by extracting as much of your time and data as it can. Manipulation isn't a side effect. It's the strategy.
So the problem was never one bad app or one broken feature. It's the structure underneath all of them. Change who a platform answers to, and everything downstream changes too.
Why TownSquare
TownSquare is a nonprofit, governed by representatives whose job is to advocate for the people who use it. There are no shareholders waiting for a return, no investors to repay. When the people making the decisions answer to you instead of to capital, the whole platform changes. Here's how.
Every one of these is something a platform built for profit couldn't offer, even if it wanted to.
Posts spread through votes, not through how long they keep you staring. The one thing every other platform optimizes for, we ignore on purpose.
Friends mode has no likes, no counts, no performance. Just the people you actually care about. No platform that sells engagement could build this.
Screen limits, soft stops, and a pause you can't talk yourself out of. We're the only platform with a reason to want you to put it down.
Ours is open and auditable. You don't have to trust that it's fair. You can check.
What you get
The structure isn't the point. This is what it gets you.
How content spreads
Most platforms spread whatever holds your eyes, true or not, kind or not. Here, you decide what's worth seeing. A few simple actions shape every feed, and you control all of them.
This is worth spreading.
Press and hold for reactions, so you can signal value across the full range of feeling. A post can anger you, move you, or make you think and still be worth seeing. Every reaction counts as an upvote. Upvotes shape your For You feed.
Show me less of this.
A private signal, never a public number, and the creator never sees it. It gently factors into how far a post travels, but there are no pile-ons and no one gets buried by a mob.
I believe in this.
Every user gets 50 free coins a day to boost posts onto Trending. Trending is weighted by how many different people back a post, so no one buys their way to the top.
Hold Upvote and a reaction menu rises from it.
Every reaction counts as an upvote, so you can signal value across the full range of feeling, not just a thumbs up. Comment and Share work like you'd expect.
What never counts
We don't rank by watchtime. We don't boost by comment count. The metrics that reward outrage and doomscrolling everywhere else simply aren't in our math. And smaller creators are weighted higher, so a great post from a new voice can outrank a big account.
You can't buy reach, and you can't trick the feed into giving it to you. The only way up is to make something worth seeing.
Your feeds
Most apps give you one feed and one algorithm deciding what you see. TownSquare gives you four, each built for a different reason, and you decide which one you are in.
Discovery from honest signals, what people upvote and downvote, never watchtime. The fullscreen video format shown here is the intended launch design, not live yet.
1 Top today The whole room sang the last one
Shipped a fix for the buggy nav bar tonight.
7A leaderboard ranked by coins, the community's vote of value. Smaller creators count for more, so it is not just the loudest accounts.
@danielr Drove out past the city to watch the day end. No feed, no notifications. Just this.
5h ago
@rohanp Repair cafe crew took the whole afternoon off in the park. Earned it.
7h ago
The people you chose, newest first. Reverse-chronological, no algorithm deciding for you. Plain on purpose.
Our mission
The problem was never one broken app. Big Tech didn't break the internet, it built the rules that run it: the feeds, the metrics, the incentives, all designed to serve the companies first and the people second.
Democratize The Internet is building the alternative: a nonprofit governed by the people who build and run it, accountable to the people who use it, with no shareholders to answer to. TownSquare is the first thing we've made, a social platform built to serve you, not to profit from you.
But the model is bigger than one app. The same approach can reshape how we connect, how we pay, how we gather, anywhere Big Tech has traded the public's interest for its own. TownSquare is the proof of concept, and the first of many.
Meet Democratize The Internet →Join the community
Follow the mission as it's built. Occasional updates, no spam, cancel anytime.
Thanks, you're on the list.
