A small, private social network for your people.
Sweet gives a group of people a shared place to write posts and chat, with built-in moderation tools, private spaces, and even dark mode. Only the people you invite can see your community.
Start a community Or run it yourself
What Sweet gives you
- A feed of posts you can comment on and add images to, for durable stuff you want to remember and discuss.
- A chat for everyday conversations, updates, and questions that don't need everyone's input.
- Rooms, which are private spaces with their own posts and chat, for a smaller group or a special interest. Only the people invited to a room can see it.
- Conversations between two people.
- Topics to organise posts by subject, and search across everything you can see.
- Notifications on your phone, and a weekly digest email if you have been away, which you can turn off.
- Rules, reports and moderators, for the people who look after the community.
On your phone
Sweet runs the same way on a computer or a phone. On a phone you can add it to your home screen, where it opens like an app and can send you notifications. At the moment, there is no app to install from an app store.
Why not just use…?
- WhatsApp groups are end-to-end encrypted, which Sweet is not, but everything happens in one scrolling chat window, and your account is tied to your phone number. WhatsApp is also owned by Meta.
- Signal is awesome, and is end-to-end encrypted too, but like WhatsApp it's built around one chat, and everyone needs a phone number to sign up.
- Facebook Groups are free and many people already use Facebook, but every member needs a Facebook account, and Meta pays for Facebook with ads chosen using what it knows about you.
- Discord has voice chat and forum channels, but it's built around chat, runs only on Discord's servers, and is partly paid for by advertising. There's also no way to export a whole Discord server's conversations.
- Slack has threads and lots of integrations, but it's built for workplaces, the Pro plan costs $8.75 per person a month, and the free plan hides messages older than 90 days.
- Mastodon is open source and federated, but posts are public by default, and it has no private groups yet.
- Discourse is open source, can be self-hosted and has chat as well, but it's built as a knowledge-focused forum, and its paid hosting starts at $100 a month.
I'll host it for you
$5 a month for your whole community, after a free trial of three months.
- You sign up through Stripe with a card. Nothing is charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel anytime.
- I set up your community by hand, usually within a day, and email you a link to get started. Its address will be yourcommunity.sweet.community.
- I keep it running, install updates and fix bugs. Your community is backed up as it changes, and I keep 30 days of backups.
- Each community can store 10 GB of photos, which is about 20,000.
- You invite your people, write the rules and choose your moderators.
- One subscription covers everyone in the community, however big it gets.
Or you can run it yourself
Sweet is free and open source software, licensed under the AGPL. You can run exactly the same Sweet on your own server at no cost. You'd look after the server, the updates and the backups – and I'll keep supplying bugfixes and improvements as long as I host Sweet myself.
Important things
Is it private? Your community is accessible only by its members. A room is visible only to the people in it, which means even the community's owner and moderators can't see inside a room unless they're in it (the exception is reported posts, comments and messages, which get shared directly with the moderators). The same goes for conversations. Sweet is not end-to-end encrypted, so whoever runs the server can read everything that is stored on it. For a community I host, that is me. I promise I will not look at your data unless you ask me to, for example to fix a problem. You'll just have to trust me on that.
Is there advertising? I cannot stress this enough: no power on Earth will compel me to share your data with advertisers. There are no tracking cookies. In fact, there are only two cookies, and both are used for signing in. I am interested in providing hosting and software support for you for a small monthly fee. That's it!
Any third party processors? A few companies handle parts of hosted Sweet. Cloudflare stores your community's photos and its backups. BitFolk provides the server it runs on. Mailgun sends its emails and can see their contents. Emails never contain anything your community has written, only your email address, your community's name, and the usernames of new members. Stripe handles payments, and only sees the person who pays. Notifications on your phone pass through Apple, Google or Mozilla, encrypted so that they can't read them.
Can we leave? Yes. If you want to move your community to your own server, tell me and I'll help you move it. A built-in export tool is planned, but not ready yet.
Who makes Sweet? One person – me. Your subscription pays for the server and for the time I spend looking after Sweet. I hate what the big platforms do to our attention, our mental health, and to communities. Sweet is my attempt at something better: small and private, supported by a community who own their own data.
I've been building and hosting sites since I was a kid. I currently run three popular online services: Gathio, a free event sharing service; Paperstack, an organiser and explorer for academic papers; and Blogflock, a social RSS feed reader. From 2019–21 I ran the first version of Sweet – an open, utopian social network (with an identical colour scheme). I closed original Sweet because most of the users left, but I'm really passionate and excited to run an even better version now – and long into the future. I'm not leaving the Internet until it leaves me.