breadcrumbs: a social platform built around what you don't post

Breadcrumbs is an app I've been designing and half-building. The rule is that you get five posts a day per group, they go out at a time the group picks, and they're gone in 24 hours.

The idea came from noticing that the group chats I actually like are the ones where nobody's performing. Nothing about the software encourages that. It just happens to be five people who know each other. I wanted to see whether you could get there on purpose.

five

Five is small enough that you have to choose. If you posted every coffee you'd be out by noon, so you don't, and what's left is the stuff you'd have mentioned to a friend anyway. The feed on the other side is short because the limit made it short, not because something decided what to show you.

BeReal is one post a day, and one is worse than five in a way I didn't expect until I used it. When you only get one moment you start waiting for a good one, and now you're performing again, just with more anxiety about it. Stories are unlimited, which is the thing I'm trying to get away from.

I picked five because it felt right, which is not a great reason. It might be three. It might be different for a family group than for four friends who see each other every day. I don't have a way to know that without people using it.

groups instead of a feed

You don't have one Breadcrumbs feed. You have a family group, a close friends group, whatever your team is. Each one is separate, with its own posting time and its own norms.

I share differently with my parents than with my friends from home than with people I play ball with, and every platform that flattens those into one audience makes me post less, because I'm writing for the most conservative reader in the room. Separate groups fix that by not creating the problem. What goes in one doesn't appear in another, and that's a rule simple enough that you can hold it in your head, which I think matters more for trust than any privacy settings page.

someone has to set the time

Each group has a leader who picks the daily posting window. Miss it and your five don't go out that day. Nothing else happens.

I like this because it puts a person in the role that an algorithm would otherwise take. A human decided this group posts at 9pm, and if it's wrong you can tell them. They can move it, let someone off, or shut the group down.

It's also the part most likely to break. What happens when the leader graduates or just stops opening the app? Does the window need to be the same every day? Should there be a fallback? I've written three versions of this in my notes and none of them are obviously right, and I suspect the answer only shows up once a group has actually been using it for a few months.

expiry

Posts disappear after a day by default. The reasoning is the same as everywhere else it's been done: when something is permanent you edit it, and when it's gone tomorrow you don't.

Groups can turn retention on if they want. Parents tracking a kid probably want to keep everything. Four people posting their Tuesday evenings probably don't. Default off, opt-in per group.

the location trail

The one feature I'm actually excited about, which is also the one I'm least sure about: optional background location logging that posts a map of your day to your premium groups in the evening.

It removes the part where you have to remember to post. And a trail is a different kind of information than a photo. You didn't curate it. It shows you went to the library at two and left at six and stopped somewhere on the way back, and combined with three photos and a line of text it says more about a day than any of those separately.

It's also the feature that requires the most trust, and I don't think it should be on by default or available in every group. Right now I have it gated behind the premium tier, mostly because that limits who's exposed to it, which is a strange reason to charge for something.

the part I have no answer to

A social app with no users is nothing, and this one is worse than most in that respect, because it only works with people you actually know. You can't seed it with strangers. Every group has to arrive more or less intact.

I don't have a plan for that. The features are the easy part and I know it. But the small, time-limited, no-audience version of sharing is the only kind I've enjoyed in years, and it seems worth trying to build the thing that defaults to it.