Theo Lindqvist
Email verifiedThat’s you. New in town since August.
Familiar Faces · a friendship app for people who are new somewhere
Your groups are already your network.
Familiar Faces is a friendship app for people who just moved and would rather not network. It hosts no groups, and it asks you to sign up for nothing. It reads the groups you already belong to, the library’s board, a musicians’ list, a letter co-op, a supper club, and shows you the people you already share one with, each under their own rules.
Free. Nobody pays to be introduced, and nobody pays to be shown.
Friday SubsFerry Room Players · public · kept by Lena
In bothwhere the lines cross
Mae Castellano (she/they)
Signed in with OAuthYou’re both in Friday Subs and Start a Band
- Through Friday Subs: not this way. This group asks senders to sign in with OAuth, and you’re email verified.
- Through Start a Band: yes. Mae takes messages only from people who share a group, and you do.
Darío Méndez (he/him)
Signed in with OAuthYou’re both in Friday Subs and Start a Band
- Through Friday Subs: not this way. This group asks senders to sign in with OAuth, and you’re email verified.
- Through Start a Band: yes. Darío takes messages only from people who share a group, and you do.
Start a BandFerry Room Players · public · kept by Ozzie
Ada Quillon (she/her)
Email verifiedYou’re both in Start a Band
- Through Start a Band: yes. Ada takes messages only from people who share a group, and you do.
Theo’s view, read from two public lists at Ferry Room Players. His groups at the Board and Ferry Room · all of them, in the app.
Why we made it
Friendship never got infrastructure
Dating got apps. Work got networks. Friendship got whatever was left over, and fewer people are finding it.
Adults with no close friends
Adults with ten or more close friends
Time spent with friends, minutes a day
About half of adults in the United States say they have felt lonely.
That is the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory, and the figures above come from it and from the Survey Center on American Life. We are not a treatment for anything. We are a small, plain tool for one part of it: when you’re new, the people you could meet are already in the groups you joined, and nobody shows you who they are.
US Surgeon General, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” 2023. Read the advisory.
What Familiar Faces is
Your groups are already your network
Theo Lindqvist moved to Port Ellery in August for a remote job. He has said yes to four groups on the library’s Board and at Ferry Room Players: New in Town, Chess After Close, Friday Subs and Start a Band: Port Ellery. He is in six more elsewhere: Ada Quillon’s Listeners and Release Night on Ada Quillon’s site; Rain Check: Everyone and Port Ellery Thursdays on Rain Check’s site; and Rides to Appointments and Meals When It’s Hard on Foul Weather Friends’ site, through pages he keeps for them. He never met most of the people in them.
Those groups are Kindling Pools §3.1: open lists that belong to the people in them and the people who keep them. Anyone can host one, and any app can read a public one, with each member’s yes already on file §5.1. That makes them a commons, not a moat. We’re one app that reads them. Another could read the same lists tomorrow.
So Familiar Faces opens full. It shows Theo the people he already shares a group with, tells him which group, and tells him whether each person takes messages from someone like him, under that person’s own rules §7.2.
Theo’s groups at the Board and Ferry Room
- New in Town The Board
with Yusra - Chess After Close The Board
with Amos, Priya - Friday Subs Ferry Room Players
with Mae, Darío - Start a Band: Port Ellery Ferry Room Players
with Ada, Darío, Mae
Elsewhere: Ada Quillon’s Listeners and Release Night on Ada Quillon’s site; Rain Check: Everyone and Port Ellery Thursdays on Rain Check’s site; and Rides to Appointments and Meals When It’s Hard on Foul Weather Friends’ site, through pages he keeps for them. Every one of his groups, in the app.
Each group keeps its own direction of hatching everywhere on this site, so you can tell them apart without color.
Getting started
No new sign-up
No profile to fill in, no photos to upload, no password. Your page stays wherever you keep it.
- Tell us your page’s address.
The one your groups already list. Theo’s is theo-lindqvist.carrd.example.
- Click the link we email you.
We send it to the Kindling identity your groups already know §4.2, so only the owner of the page can open Familiar Faces for it.
- See your people.
We read the groups that list your page §3.5, and show you who else is in them. That’s the whole setup.
What we keep: your email address and your page’s address. What we don’t: a profile, a photo, a list of who you looked at.
What it won’t do
Nothing here is built to keep you scrolling
An app that earns while you’re still looking has every reason to keep you looking. We don’t earn that way, so we don’t build that way.
- No streaks.Nothing counts the days you opened it. There’s nothing to open: Familiar Faces is a page you visit and one email a week.
- No feed.No endless scroll of people. You see the people you already share a group with, group by group, and the page ends.
- No follower counts.Nobody has a number. Nobody sees who looked at them. A person is a name, a verification level and the group you share.
- No paid boosts.Nobody can pay to be shown first, and no group can pay to be put in front of you. Every group is read the same way.
- No algorithm deciding who you see.People sit in the order they joined each group. If they’re here, it’s because you share a group, and the page says which.
- No new profile to keep up.Your page stays yours, wherever you keep it. We copy no photos and store no profile.
One room, many doors
The Board is still the Board
Familiar Faces and the library’s own site show the same Pool. Neither one owns it.
At the Board
Maggie O’Rourke keeps the Tuesday walk, pinned up on the library’s Board with its charter, its keepers, and the reference desk that vouches for patrons in person.
In Familiar Faces
Maggie asked Theo in. Familiar Faces shows her request beside the groups he’s already in, with the Board’s own accept and decline links §5.2. Answer here or at the Board; it’s the Board’s Pool either way.
Both read one file: board.elleryfreelibrary.example/pools/tuesday-walkers.json. Familiar Faces can’t add anyone to it, change its rules, or stand between you and Maggie.
Friendship here
Other parts of people’s lives stay where they put them
People are in all kinds of Pools: a bandmates list, a letter co-op, the friendship side of a non-monogamy community, a supper club, and sometimes a dating list. Kindling lets someone be out in one Pool and private in another §3.2.
Familiar Faces is for friendship, so it keeps two rules. It shows only groups you’re in, or that are public. And it never shows anyone’s dating groups in your friends view, even public ones, even when the person is someone you know from band practice.
What that means in practice
- You see a person because of a group you share, and only that group is named.
- A group that is unlisted or invite-only never appears unless you’re in it.
- A group tagged dating never appears in a friends view, and nothing hints that it exists.
Where the money comes from
Free to use, paid for by the places whose groups we read
Libraries, clubs and co-ops already spend money on bringing people together: a notice board, a monthly coffee, a supper on the second Sunday. When their groups are easier to find, they get more of what they’re paying for. So they chip in, each a yearly amount it chooses, from the budget it already has for this.
That money never buys a place in line. A group is read and shown the same way whether its host chips in or not, and no group can pay to be shown first. Nobody pays to be introduced, and nothing is charged at the connection layer §1.3.
If Familiar Faces helped you find a friend, you can say thanks afterward, with a note or a few dollars. Only after, never before, and never to see someone.
Why this is enough
Familiar Faces is cheap to run. It hosts no groups, stores no profiles and copies no photos. It reads public files, checks each person’s rules, and sends one email a week.
Contact: hello@familiarfaces.example
The part only an open protocol allows
Why this couldn’t exist inside a closed app
A closed friendship app would have to start empty and wait for your neighbors to sign up. Then it would own the list. Try it: close the app, and see what Theo keeps.
Both apps are open. Each shows Theo’s four groups at the Board and Ferry Room.
Familiar Faces, reading open Pools
The groups live with their hosts. Familiar Faces is one door.
- New in TownThe Board
- Chess After CloseThe Board
- Friday SubsFerry Room Players
- Start a Band: Port ElleryFerry Room Players
Theo sees six people across four groups, and who takes messages from him.
A closed app
The groups, the people and the messages live inside the app.
- New in Towninside the app
- Chess After Closeinside the app
- Friday Subsinside the app
- Start a Band: Port Elleryinside the app
Theo sees the same six people, as long as they all signed up here too.
- Pools are a commons.
Theo’s groups are open manifests §3.1. Familiar Faces read them on day one, so it opened full, with nobody asked to join anything new.
- One room, many doors.
The Board still shows the Tuesday walk its own way §1.2. Familiar Faces is another door to the same room, and the Board gives nothing up.
- Every shape of relationship.
A person’s dating Pools stay out of your friends view, because each Pool declares its own visibility and intent §3.2. A single closed profile can’t keep them apart like that.
- Nobody owns the directory.
We find groups the way anyone can: each host’s well-known file and any registry §8.3 §8.5. If we closed, the files would still be there.
- Email is the floor.
No app to install and no notifications. One email on Monday §6.1, readable anywhere. See this week’s.
- Leaving costs nothing.
Leave a group with one action, within sixty seconds §5.3. Stop using Familiar Faces and you lose nobody: your groups and your page were never ours.
Nobody owns the directory
Where we find groups
Every host that wants to be found publishes a small file at a well-known address §10.1. We read those files, like any app can. Here are the ones we read for Port Ellery, with the ones that list nothing on purpose.
- kindling.foundation/.well-known/kindling-pool
Kindling · lists 5 Pools - board.elleryfreelibrary.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
The Board · lists 7 Pools - ferryroom.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Ferry Room Players · lists 5 Pools - thecircular.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
The Circular · lists 1 Pool - scatteredlight.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Scattered Light · lists 1 Pool - correolento.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Correo Lento · lists 4 Pools - latesupper.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Late Supper · lists 1 Pool - manymoons.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Many Moons · lists 2 Pools - hearthhold.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Hearthhold · lists 2 Pools - wrenslist.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Wren’s List · lists 1 Pool - secondtidebooks.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Second Tide Books · lists 1 Pool - queerharbor.example/.well-known/kindling-pool
Queer Harbor · lists no Pools
Our own file lists no Pools, because we host none: familiarfaces.example/.well-known/kindling-pool. Every Pool we read, and what we do with it.