Coming Soon
A peer-to-peer community app connecting you to friends, neighbors, and local businesses through rings of trust. No ads. No algorithms. No data plays.
The large platforms discovered that opacity in monetization scales better than transparency. If users fully understood that every interaction was being scored, stored and sold, the discomfort would reduce engagement. So the monetization was made invisible — buried in terms of service, obscured by the word "free."
The user thinks the app is free. The app knows the user is the product. That information asymmetry was the business model.
"The monetization model is itself a trust signal to the community."
The Vision
MyChatCircle restores what the platforms replaced. The notice board. The town crier. The chat over the fence. With the reach of digital technology and the intimacy of physical proximity.
Person-centered
You are the center. The circle is yours. Content orbits you — you do not dissolve into a feed.
Peer-to-peer
No central server holds your messages. No company sits between you and your community.
Plain and open
Plain text. No file hosting. No data plays. The simplicity is the politics.
The Architecture
We do not treat all relationships the same. No platform should make us pretend otherwise.
You
Your identity, your settings, your rules. You decide what each outer ring can see about you. Location precision decreases as the rings widen.
Friends
Explicitly invited and accepted. Bidirectional. Direct one-to-one messaging. The people you actually know and chose.
Social Groups
Formed around shared context — neighborhood watch, hiking club, school parents. Members may be strangers but the circle is intentional.
Public Radius
Your geographic community. Opt-in visibility. Neighbors, businesses, organizations — the town square layer. You control who can reach you.
"The Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea traded objects of no practical value across hundreds of miles of ocean — not for need, but to maintain the relationships that made their world hold together."
The Gift Economy
WeChat gave Chinese users the red envelope — a digital form of an existing cultural gift ritual. MyChatCircle does the same for American communities with something people already understand: the coupon. Not a discount. A gift.
Local businesses issue coupons for real discrete items — one free coffee, one free slice — not percentages or points. Real value, controlled cost, no platform commission.
Coupons can be given to friends, traded with neighbors, or passed to strangers in your radius. Each trade is a reason to interact that carries mutual benefit and zero social risk.
Every coupon carries the chain of who held it. Issued by Corner Cafe, given to Maria, traded to you. Provenance from the community, not from a marketing department.
Founding Principles
These are not features. They are not policies subject to revision when circumstances change. They are the load-bearing walls.
I
Every person on the network is a participant, not a data source. Their behavior is not recorded for sale. Their attention is not inventory.
II
The monetization model, the technical architecture, and the rules of the network are fully visible to anyone who wants to understand them.
III
MyChatCircle does not amplify, suppress, promote or demote any content, person or viewpoint. The platform is infrastructure.
IV
No advertising. No algorithms. No data harvesting. No read receipts. No follower counts. Each absence is a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
V
Businesses may pay to attach a URL or receive a verified badge. Nothing else. Ever. The boundary is permanent and is stated here at the founding, before any pressure to expand it.
VI
Twelve people in a six block radius is enough. The app delivers value on day one, not at critical mass. Growth is welcome but never at the cost of these principles.
Stay in the Circle
MyChatCircle is in development. Leave your email and we will reach you when it is ready — once, with no strings attached.
No newsletter. No marketing. One email when we launch.