Hello.

If you're here you probably found us through a friend, or a tweet, or some chain of clicks that ended at a thing called Rhyme. We figured it was worth writing down what this is, what we're trying to do, and how you can be part of it if any of it sounds right to you.

Who we are

We're a small group of engineers in Kansas City. We've been on the internet a long time. We've watched the internet turn into something that doesn't really feel like ours anymore, and after years of complaining about it to each other, we got tired enough of complaining to actually try doing something.

Why we're doing it

The shortest version is that the platforms got dumber and meaner, and we got tired of being told that's just how it is. The longer version lives over on the Why page, which is a 9 minute read if you're up for it.

The thing that finally got us moving wasn't outrage or any specific incident. It was the indifference. The way we've all collectively just shrugged and accepted that pile-ons are normal, that every comment section is a fight, that the algorithm is going to feed you outrage no matter what you actually want. That's the part we couldn't get past.

We don't think social media has to work the way it currently works. We're betting that other people feel that too.

What makes it different

A few things, at the level of how the thing is built rather than what we promise on the marketing page.

One room per topic, not seven. If you want to talk about the Kansas City Chiefs there's a Chiefs room. Just one. We build and maintain the topic structure ourselves so it doesn't fragment.

Topics are hierarchical, and posts can live in many of them. A post about the AirPods Max shows up loudest in AirPods Max, quieter in AirPods, softer in Apple, faintly in Technology. You don't have to guess where to put it or cross-post manually. The structure does the work, so the conversation finds the right people on its own.

Moderation is global, not feudal. The rules are the rules. They apply everywhere. We don't hand little communities to random volunteers who get to invent their own laws and ban people for sport.

Voting exists, but the counts are private. You vote, the system listens, but you don't see the number and neither does anyone else. We're trying very hard to break the slot-machine point-chasing dynamic that has made everywhere else feel like work. Post because you have something to say.

You decide what your feed is for. Every post gets read for intent and tone. Want only educational stuff? Sure. Only funny? Sure. No politics, no doom, no rants? Done. The feed is a tool you control, not a thing that controls you.

Why you should care

Honestly, you might not. That's fine. If you're happy with where you spend your time online and how it makes you feel, you don't need us.

But if any of this sounds familiar, if you've been quietly wondering whether it has to be this exhausting, then yeah, maybe give us a look. A different kind of place is possible. Some of us have to actually go build it.

How to participate

Right now there's exactly one thing to do, and it takes about ten seconds: get on the waitlist. We're letting people in every day, in batches, slowly enough that we can keep up with feedback and not crater the whole thing on the first weekend.

That's it. That's the whole ask for now.

The single best thing you can do to help

Tell people. Genuinely. If you read this and any of it landed, the most useful thing in the world right now is for you to send it to one or two friends who might be tired of the way things are. Tweet it, text it, drop it in a group chat. We don't have a marketing budget. We don't have a Series A. We don't have anyone whose job it is to make Rhyme show up in your feed. Word of mouth is the entire engine. So if you're sitting there thinking "yeah, actually," the thing that helps most is hitting share.

What's next

Over the next few weeks we'll be writing a regular series of deep dives. Behind-the-scenes stuff. Specific features and how we built them. The mindset behind certain decisions. Things we got wrong on the first try and what we learned. We want to be transparent about what we're doing and why, partly because we think you deserve that, and partly because doing it in the open keeps us honest.

Thanks for reading. Glad you're here.

The Rhyme team