meep is a personal (asocial) microblog—a platform designed to sync your thoughts with a precisely chosen audience of your choosing, and absolutely no one else.
Unlike traditional social networks that reward virality, public engagement, and algorithmic amplification, meep is built on a simple premise: you grant people access to your entire meep stream, and only those people can read all your posts.
There are no reblogs, no boosts, no shares. There are no replies or comments. There's no way for your content to spread beyond your intended recipients. Your thoughts stay exactly where you put them: with the people you choose.
The Philosophy
meep is built on the belief that not every thought needs to be broadcast to the world. In fact, most of our meaningful thoughts shouldn't be public.
The assumption that "all content should be shareable and amplifiable" is baked into every social network today. That assumption is:
- Psychologically harmful - It encourages performance over authenticity
- Socially destructive - It amplifies outrage and toxicity
- Commercially exploitative - It treats your thoughts as raw material to be packaged and sold
- Fundamentally wrong - Most human connection happens in small, private groups, not in public squares
meep rejects this model entirely. It says: your thoughts are yours, and you decide who gets to read them, and that's enough.
The Core Idea: Controlled Distribution
meep is built on one radical principle: you decide, with total precision, who has access to your entire stream.
Think of it like a journal that you can share with exactly the people you choose. You decide who gets access to read all of your posts. They can read what you wrote, but they can't quote it, share it, reply to it, or spread it further. Your thoughts go to them and stop there.
This is how meep makes it possible:
🔒 Complete Control Over Who Reads Your Thoughts
You decide exactly who can read your stream. Grant access to specific people and revoke it anytime. Your words reach only those you choose— no public posts, no discovery, no surprises.
👥 Write for People You Know, Not Performance
You're not writing for an algorithm or invisible strangers. You're writing for people you know and trust. No engagement metrics to chase, no performance anxiety—just authentic thoughts shared with genuine people.
🛡️ No Viral Spread, No Public Archive
meep has no repost, boost, or quote features—so your content can't spread virally through the platform itself. Your posts aren't indexed by search engines or archived forever. (Of course, people could screenshot or manually share your words elsewhere, but there's no algorithmic or structural way for your content to amplify beyond who you shared it with.)
🔐 Private by Default, Not Encrypted at Rest
Only your chosen recipients can access your stream. No platforms selling your data, no advertisers profiling you, no surveillance. Your data is yours alone. (Note: posts are currently stored on your server without encryption at rest, but access is controlled by password.)
📡 Subscribe with any RSS Reader
Every meep instance generates RSS feeds of posts you have access to. Follow others using your favorite RSS reader—pull content on your terms, with no central platform controlling what you see.
🏠 Self-Hosted and Truly Yours
Run meep on your own server. You own your data completely. No dependence on anyone else's infrastructure or goodwill. Your platform, your rules.
📝 Posts Stored as Plain Markdown
Your posts are saved as simple Markdown files, not structured in a rigid database. You can read them with any text editor, version control them, back them up easily, or migrate them anywhere. Your data isn't trapped.
What meep is NOT
meep is not trying to be the next big social network; it's not trying to do "the same thing but better" for platforms that already exist - social network, discussions, or collaborations.
🚫 A Social Media Competitor
meep doesn't compete with Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or any platform designed for public engagement. It's not trying to be a better version of those platforms—it's a fundamentally different concept. If you want followers, viral content, and mass reach, meep is not for you.
🚫 A Platform for Public Broadcasting
You can't publish to the world. Your posts aren't discoverable by search engines or random users. There's no "trending" section. There's no public feed. meep is not the place to make you famous or reach a mass audience.
🚫 A Forum or Discussion Platform
There are no replies, no comments, no public discussions. meep is not a place for debate or community deliberation. It's not designed for back-and-forth conversation with strangers or even acquaintances.
🚫 A Collaborative Tool
You can't quote other users, no one can build on your ideas publicly, and there's no mechanism for group contribution. Each thought stands alone, shared only with those you specify.
🚫 About Engagement Metrics
There are no likes, no view counts, no favorites, no analytics showing how many people read your posts. You post your thoughts and sync them with your audience. That's it.
Who Should Use meep?
meep is designed for specific use cases where one-way distribution to a defined audience is exactly what you need—where you want to share your thoughts, but not receive responses, collaboration, or group discussion.
Personal Journaling with Selected Readers
Share diary entries, reflections, and personal thoughts with a trusted inner circle—maybe close friends or family—by granting them access to your entire stream. It's journaling, but not completely private. Readers can follow along without needing to reply or comment.
Creators Sharing Work-in-Progress
Share your creative work—sketches, drafts, essays, photography, music notes—with supporters without worrying about theft, unsolicited criticism, or public exposure. They see what you create, but can't share it forward or respond.
Families Staying Connected
Grant access to your stream to family members so they can see life updates, photos, thoughts, and milestones. Your family business stays within the family. Everyone is reading, no one is replying.
Public Figures Sharing Private Thoughts
If you're someone with a public presence, use meep to share personal thoughts with a specific group of friends or trusted followers—completely separate from your public platform. They get the unfiltered version without the noise or performance.
Life Updates for Distant Friends
Keep friends and family informed about your life without the obligation of back-and-forth chat. They subscribe to your stream and stay updated without needing to maintain real-time conversation.
Thought Collections for a Specific Audience
Some people want to share their writing, thinking, or observations with a small, trusted group—not for feedback or collaboration, but simply to be read. Meep is perfect for this one-way sharing.
Following Others: RSS Feeds
In meep, the best way to follow another user's stream (assuming they've granted you access) is through RSS.
Each user's meep instance generates an RSS feed of their posts that you're authorized to read. You subscribe to that feed in your favorite RSS reader (Feedly, NetNewsWire, Miniflux, or any other RSS client), and new posts automatically appear in your reader when they're published.
This is a radical departure from how social networks work today. Instead of logging into a central platform to see posts from people you follow, you pull their posts into your own personal reader. It's:
- Decentralized - You don't depend on meep's platform to aggregate feeds. Your RSS reader is yours to control.
- Privacy-Preserving - Your RSS reader doesn't track what you read or build a profile of your interests.
- Simple - RSS is an open standard that's been around for decades. No proprietary APIs or lock-in.
- Chronological - Posts appear in your reader in the order they were published, with no algorithmic manipulation.
- Offline-Friendly - Many RSS readers let you read offline and sync when you reconnect.
RSS feeds are the natural, privacy-respecting way to stay connected to the people whose thoughts you want to follow. It's how the internet worked before algorithms, and it still works beautifully.
Recommended RSS Readers
If you're looking for a simple, privacy-respecting RSS reader to follow meep streams:
Android: Capy Reader
Free and open source, available on the Play Store and F-Droid. Designed with simplicity and approachability as the core philosophy. No tracking, no ads, no complexity—just clean RSS subscription and reading. Perfect for non-technical users.
iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire
Completely free and open source (MIT license). Works beautifully across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. No ads, no tracking, no surveillance. Simple, fast, and actively maintained. With its focus on the open web , NetNewsWire is the perfect companion to meep's philosophy of simplicity and control.
Technical Foundation
meep is built with the following principles:
- Open Source - Full transparency. You can audit every line of code and verify it does what we say it does.
- Self-Hosted - Deploy on your own server. You control the infrastructure, the data, everything.
- Minimal - No unnecessary features. No algorithmic complexity. No feature bloat. Just controlled distribution of your thoughts.
- Encrypted - Your thoughts and access lists are encrypted. Even the platform operator can't read your content.
- Simple to Deploy - Getting meep running should take minutes, not hours or days.
Sound Exciting? Ready to get meeping?
Well, meep isn't quite there yet. There are still some big features left to be implemented before it's ready for primetime. For now, keep an eye on the project's Codeberg .
The biggest way you can support meep right now is to reach out and let me know you're interested.
No algorithms. No virality. No performance metrics. No data harvesting. No public broadcasting. Just you, your thoughts, and the people you trust.
meep!
Inspirations
meep was inspired by a collection of ideas, articles, and technologies
- The Open Source and Free Software movements - the principles that software should be transparent, auditable, and not locked behind corporate control. That users should own their tools, not be owned by them, and that software made by those who love it will always inevitably be better than software made for solely for profit.
- Decentralization and escape from corporate profiteering - inspired by movements like the Fediverse, Mastodon, and ActivityPub that reject the premise that a single corporation should control all digital communication. The understanding that technology doesn't have to be a profit-extraction machine, that enshittification is not the only option.
- The philosophy of small web - the idea that not everything needs to scale to billions of users; of making something for a small niche of users (or even just for myself).
-
Simplifying architecture
from the absurdly complex
- No heavy front-end framework needed; the web that was is still just what we need, if we don't overcomplicate it
- No database, instead using simple flat files; Markdown files can go anywhere
- No follow-management needed; RSS already solved subscribing to content elegantly—you don't need the platform to manage your follows
-
The observation that most
meaningful human connection
happens in small groups, not public squares
- The Art of Not Sharing by Joan Westenberg
- The Barnraiser's Project on what it means to build a community