Your story.
Your community.
Yours, truly.
A social network for the open web.
free to join · no password · no lock-in
You didn’t stop being social.
You stopped taking the bait.
The feed learned what set you off, then served you more of it.
To sell ads and sponsorships.
Being social was never supposed to feel like that.
* Filing GitHub issues does not — on its own — qualify you as “being social.”
Yours.
On polis, your name, your words, and your follow list belong to you.
You own what you write, you decide what you read and what conversations you host.
All of it answers to you.
“Yours” is provable, cryptographically.
No account. No central server. The three things you own are just three plain things sitting on the open web:
following.jsonNothing here was re-invented — it’s DNS, HTTPS, email, and Ed25519, load-bearing for thirty years. There’s no switch for a company to flip, because there’s no company in the loop.
Truly.
Not a promise we make — a fact we can’t revoke.
Each of these is guaranteed by how polis is built: true by design.
One identity, recognized on every polis site — not a fresh account you rebuild on each app. It’s yours the way a web address is yours: issued by no company, so no one can suspend it, impersonate you, or take it back.
Every post and every comment is saved as your own copy, on your own site, in a plain format that opens anywhere and reads the same in fifty years. Download all of it in one click, anytime — nothing held hostage, nothing to ask permission for.
The folks who follow you are following you — not an app that rents them back. Move to a new home or your own domain and your audience travels along. No starting from zero, ever.
You see the people you chose to follow, in the order they posted. Nothing is boosted, buried, or tuned to keep you scrolling. Your feed answers to you — not to whatever holds your attention longest.
Leaving isn’t a fight with a settings menu. Move to another polis host, or your own domain, whenever you like — and nothing breaks. The exit was built on purpose, because a home you can’t leave was never really yours.
“Truly” is a signature check.
Every post is signed with your private key, over its own bytes. Flip a single character and the signature stops verifying. Anyone can check it against the public key at your /.well-known/polis — no trust in us required.
That’s the whole trick behind “impossible to quietly take back.” The math doesn’t care who’s hosting the file.
See it live.
Follow discover.polis.pub to learn about polis — how it thinks, how it works, what inspired it.
cp -r.Or, drop in on vdibart.polis.pub →
Discovery is an index, not a host.
Every polis site answers PQL. Ask it in plain words — and the same URL serves a page to people and JSON to machines. The Discovery Service just indexes what exists and where; the content itself never leaves the author’s own domain.
{
"query": "all posts from why.polis.pub by date",
"version": "pql.v1",
"tenant": "why.polis.pub",
"items": [
{
"type": "post",
"title": "Look, if you want to subsidize social media barons…",
"url": "/posts/20260609/look-if-you-want-to-subsidize-social-media-barons.html",
"author_domain": "why.polis.pub",
"published": "2026-06-09T17:12:11Z",
"published_human": "June 9 · 5:12pm",
"excerpt": "…we can’t stop you. But we can show you a better way.",
"body_html": "<p>Look, if you want to subsidize social media barons…</p>"
}, … 19 more
],
"pagination": { "has_more": false, "next_cursor": "" }
}
These are why.polis.pub’s own posts, served straight from its domain — swap the sentence for any site and the shape is identical. Same URL, two representations: a page for people, this JSON for machines.
Wondering how any of this holds up?
There’s no magic here — just decades-old, boringly reliable web technology, recombined in a new way. Just in case this sounds too good to be true, we wrote the whole thing down.
Read the docs →Create your site.Welcome back.
Pick a handle and you’re live in minutes. No password to invent, no card to enter — you sign in with a link we email you.Enter your email and we’ll send you a one-time sign-in link. No password, nothing to remember.
Your email is never shown and never shared. It’s only how you sign back in.
Already have a space? Sign inNew to polis? Create a space
Rather run it on your own server? Self-host with the open-source CLI →
* If you’re reading this, you’re probably a security nerd looking for security docs. We get it.
Things people ask.
polis serve inside it, and enter your password in Messages to read them in the same web UI — fully offline. For a command-line extract, use polis dm decrypt. See the local-decryption guide.