Nearstream is a quieter way to share with people you actually know.

No followers. No algorithm. No likes. Just your close friends, on their own little sites, posting what they feel like — and a shared reader that pulls it all into one calm timeline.

The experience

You open the reader. You see your friends’ posts from today — photos, a few words, a sketch, whatever they felt like sharing.

Everything is sorted by time. No recommendations, no suggested content, no ads. Just a quiet scroll through the day of people you actually know.

You close it when you’re done. Nothing tries to pull you back.

The principles

  • You own your domain. Your content lives on your site, not on a platform.
  • Your audience is people you chose. Not followers — friends.
  • No likes, no views, no metrics. Sharing without performing.
  • No algorithm decides what you see. Time is the only order.

Under the hood

Optional. For the technically curious.

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A single Next.js app, AGPL-3.0, open source. Each person gets a tenant — their own site at /your-handle, their own RSS feed, their own posts. The reader pulls friends’ feeds, merges by date, renders type-shaped cards. That’s the whole architecture.

github.com/br00/nearstream →ManifestoARCHITECTURE.md
Primitives
Stream (timestamped notes), Library (essays + inventory items, each at its own URL), Letter (the dated dispatch at the top of a home), Source (a friend’s feed URL in your local reader).
Protocol
RSS 2.0 with a tiny Nearstream namespace xmlns:nearstream so typed entries (note / essay / picture) round-trip between instances. Any RSS reader can read a Nearstream feed; any Nearstream reader can read any RSS feed.
Storage
Cloudflare R2 (S3-compatible). Each tenant’s content lives at users/your-id/…. No database, no migrations.
Auth
Magic-link email via Resend. Sessions are HMAC-signed cookies, 30 lines of Web Crypto. No SDKs, no JWT library, no Lucia.
Deploy
Vercel today, intentionally portable. No Vercel-specific APIs — the codebase ships as a single container to anywhere that runs Node.
“A small audience of people you actually care about is more meaningful than a large audience of strangers.”

The web was personal once. It can be again.