Why Bonafide?

Start with what most people have noticed. Social apps get worse over time. A few companies dominate nearly every category, and the alternatives never seem to reach anyone you know.

The usual explanations are about the companies. They got greedy, or they lost their way. Those explanations are sometimes true, but they don't explain why it happens so reliably, to so many different companies, in so many different categories. We think the cause is structural.

How apps are built

The early internet was a set of open protocols. Email is the best example. Anyone could run a mail server, and any mail client could talk to any server. Then the web made it easy to build applications, and applications took a different shape: a company runs a database, and users get an account in it. Your profile, your contacts, your messages, and the rules about who can see what are all rows in that company's tables.

This isn't only a social media problem. The same structure decides which businesses you see when you look for somewhere to eat, which driver turns up when you need a ride, and how you buy and sell in any market where a walled garden has taken over. Wherever one app owns the accounts and the relationships, it also gets to write the rules.

What follows from it

If your data and relationships live in the app, you can't take them anywhere. Your friends are in the app too, so leaving means leaving them. The businesses on the other side are stuck in the same way. When most people ordering food delivery are on one of two apps, a restaurant can't leave either, however painful the fees get. The same goes for drivers, hosts, sellers, and freelancers. The value of a network is mostly who's in it, and the app holds that.

When users and businesses can't realistically leave, the company doesn't have to compete hard to keep them. It can optimize for what it gets out of everyone on the platform. That tends to mean advertising, attention, data, and higher fees for the businesses trying to reach you. Quality declines slowly, because nobody has anywhere good to go.

Identity and trust get built into every app separately. Each one gets its own accounts, its own spam problem, its own privacy model, and its own idea of who you are. None of it was designed for trust, privacy, or real user control, because that wasn't the job it was built to do.

Plenty of people have better ideas than the incumbents. A social app without an algorithm, a ride hailing app that takes a smaller cut from drivers, a food delivery service run by local restaurants, a marketplace built for one craft, a messaging app with a different take on privacy. But when everyone is stuck wherever everyone already is, it's nearly impossible to compete. You end up with goliath versus goliath in every category, instead of a dynamic market with lots of different offerings.

Local businesses make a city better, and the same should be true online. Online should be even more interoperable and competitive than the physical world, but it's worse. The missing interoperability is the reason. It's a great position if you raised the money and ran faster than everyone else to become the big network. Now you get to sit back and cash in while your app gets worse and your users get more stuck.

It should work like coffee shops. There's room for the big chains, but they can't stop their customers from walking into the new place on the corner. That's how it should work online.

Other work in this area

There's been a lot of renewed interest in foundational protocol work, and we think that's good. Projects like AT Protocol and Solid show how much appetite there is for alternatives to the current model.

Our view is that each addresses part of the problem. AT Protocol and Solid give people portable data and a public, addressable identity, which makes sense for public social networks and shared data stores. Bonafide starts from a different place. It has no addresses at all, only connections, and that changes who can contact you and how privacy works. It's also a multi-layer and multi-domain protocol, so one set of connections can serve messaging, marketplaces, payments, and more, and fine-grained access control is built in at the base instead of being left to each app. What we found missing was a single mechanism that lets individuals and businesses exist and interact online with real control and interoperability across many domains, and not only public social.

Why a protocol

People have been building "better apps" for a long time, but they're limited by the current structure, which encourages walled gardens. A structural fix has to change the structure. A protocol is how you do that, since it lets many apps share the same foundation, and everyone gets to share in the use of the hard parts that come for free from the protocol.

That's also why the design is built around a person instead of an app. In the offline world, you don't have one identity that every relationship refers back to. You have a relationship with a coworker and a different one with your sibling. Each is private to the two of you. Bonafide models the network that way: each connection is unique, consensual, and controlled by the two people who made it. There's no central identity underneath.

What we're hoping for

If people own their data and connections, apps lose the ability to compete on lock-in. What's left is quality, price, preference, design, speed, customer service, and values. When apps are interoperable, that simply creates a better market. We'd expect to see many more small apps. Having the audience no longer makes you impossible to compete with. If someone has a better idea for how an app in a domain can work, or their own take on the interface, that might be enough for you to prefer it and switch. Buying coffee from Starbucks once doesn't stop you getting it from somewhere else tomorrow.

Anyone who wants to develop a Bonafide app also doesn't have to worry about the basics: connections, access control, and data portability. And you can tell your users they don't have to simply trust you not to build a creepy business model or to enshittify the app over time, because they can leave without losing anything.

We don't know how quickly people will want this, or how many developers will build on it. This architecture took several iterations to land where it is today. We're confident in the architecture and design, and we've built something real on it.