An old idea, and why we're building it now

The first sketches for Snakken are older than the company. I drew them as a student, around an annoyance that never quite went away: the things happening closest to you are the hardest to find out about.

Two situations kept the idea alive. The first was hearing about something good two streets over only after it was done — a flea market, a courtyard party, a reading in the bookshop down the road — usually three days late, from someone who had been there. That same week, a social feed would happily tell me which festival was on 500 kilometres away. The distance felt inverted. The further something was, the easier it was to see.

The second was the group of road cyclists clipped in outside a café on a Saturday morning. Clearly a regular thing, clearly local, and no way to find out where the ride actually starts or when the next one is. The information existed. It just lived in a chat group I wasn't in, or on a flyer I'd walked past.

So the idea was never "another social network." It was narrower than that: show me the handful of streets where I actually live, and not much else. One feed, ordered by how near and how new something is — your neighbourhood, not the whole internet.

Why now

The idea sat for the better part of a decade. I sketched it as a student, went off and did other engineering, and the list of features stayed a list. Local apps came and went in the meantime; none of them scratched the itch, and none of them pushed me to start.

What finally tipped it was the ground shifting under the idea, not the idea itself. European digital sovereignty has gone from a niche worry to something people actively want: software that runs here, under European rules, instead of quietly handing the neighbourhood to a platform on another continent. Local, ad-free, on EU servers with the GDPR baked in — the part of the idea I used to half-apologise for is now the reason to build it.

That's the timing. I finally started building at the end of 2025, years after the sketch. A hyperlocal feed was always worth wanting; building one that's European by construction feels worth the work in a way it didn't back then.

What we settled before there was code

The other half of the decision was that if we were going to build this at all, we'd build it properly from the first commit instead of bolting the principles on once it got popular. A few things were fixed early and haven't moved since.

The first is that privacy lives in the structure. Your phone resolves its GPS fix into a coarse H3 cell locally and sends only that cell, so the server never sees coordinates: there is nowhere in the design for them to arrive. The same instinct keeps the attack surface small. The less we store, the less there is to steal, to leak, or to be compelled to hand over, which is why accounts are passkey-only; we'd rather not keep the thing that gets stolen.

The rest is where and what it is. Servers sit in the EU, and the GDPR shaped the product before it shaped any compliance doc; we didn't want a quiet dependency we'd have to apologise for later. It's easy to describe a project entirely by what it refuses to do, so the plain version is worth saying out loud: what we want is a local, welcoming feed of the streets around you.

What it costs

None of that is free, and the honest version says so. Hyperlocal means the feed is quiet until enough neighbours show up — there's no global firehose to paper over an empty cell. Throwing away tracking and behavioural signals on purpose means we don't get the cheap engagement tricks that make a new app feel instantly busy. And building it right from the start is slower than shipping something loose and fixing the privacy story afterwards, which is the more common order.

We think the trade is worth it, but it is a trade. This notebook is where we'll show the work behind that bet as it gets built — the decisions, the things that broke, and the parts we got wrong. The reason for the app hasn't changed since those student sketches. The meet-up two streets over should be easier to find than the festival 500 kilometres away.