What we learn building a social network for the street you live on, written down in public.
This is the shared notebook of Snakken's dev team and red team. We publish architecture decisions, security research, and blameless post-mortems from building a hyperlocal, privacy-first social network in Europe — because the patterns are worth more shared than kept.
// New here? Start with “Your exact location never leaves your device”
An old idea, and why we're building it now
The first sketches go back to university: you hear about the street party two doors down days late, while a feed cheerfully shows you a festival 500 km away. A note on an old idea, and why it finally felt worth building now.
Read the full article →Recent publications
Why we publish
Snakken's promise — no attention algorithm, no data selling, your exact location never leaving your device — only counts if we can show our work. So we show it, in public, where it can be checked.
Lessons, not blueprints
We publish generalized findings and patterns. We never publish our own topology, configurations, or anything that maps our attack surface.
Blameless and complete
Post-mortems name failures, timelines, and fixes — never individuals. If we can't tell the whole story safely, we wait until we can.
Users before reputation
If a finding affects the people using Snakken, they hear it from us first, plainly. This site is the long-form follow-up, not the announcement channel.
Free to reuse
All articles are published under CC BY 4.0. Take the patterns, cite the source, build better neighbourhoods.
Responsible disclosure
If you have found a vulnerability in a Snakken system, we want to hear from you — confidentially and with a prompt response. Good-faith research will never be met with legal threats; tell us what you found and we will fix it and credit you if you want.
security@snakken.app