About Sphare

Sphare is the place to exchange with other people about your hobbies, art, news, jokes and many more topics. Sphare is an ad-free, source-available website with a focus on transparency, privacy and community empowerment. Sphare's goal is to run by relying solely on donations and to provide a better user experience than ad-based platforms.

Rules & moderation

Sphare aims to be a place for positive and constructive exchanges. In order to make it so, a base set of rules needs to be respected site-wide. Communities can set additional rules to define what content is appropriate and how users should behave.

Future improvements

Many functionalities could still be added to Sphare. My goal is to focus on the wishes of the community and providing the tools needed by moderators. In the long term, I'd like to make Sphare a non-profit and setup a membership system to at least cover the operational costs and, if possible, be able to work more on Sphare. Here is a list of the topics I have in mind at the moment.

• What the community wishes for!
• Additional moderation tools
• Memberships - users can become contributors and get access to additional features
• Time filters
• Bot detection
• Moderator elections
• Private messages

Why "Sphare"?

Sphare, pronounced like S-fair ([sfɛr]) or "Sphère" in French, is the combination of Sphere, the communities on Sphare, and Share.

The name symbolizes this project's goals: to enable people to discuss their interests and share knowledge. At the same time, it still acknowledges the "bubbles" we often build for ourselves and lets you access other viewpoints without control from an algorithm. By adhering to these principles and relying on donations rather than ads, Sphare aims to provide a healthier alternative to Big Tech social media.

Origin & goals

I started thinking about Sphare around summer 2023 after several social media platforms I used made changes with a negative impacts on their user base. I already had quite a low opinion of most social networks, thinking they were pretty terrible for the mental health of many of their users and that their ad-based profit model is fundamentally incompatible with a good user experience.

This gave me the idea to try building a better platform, one that would be non-profit, rely on donations instead of ads and would be focus on transparency. Being non-profit and relying on donations is extremely important, as it switches the company's focus from making users mindlessly scroll through content to generate more ad-revenue to providing a great user experience that want to contribute to with donations. Furthermore, not relying on ads means there is a much greater incentive to deal with bots, as inflating the number of users and generated content becomes less relevant.

In such a structure, transparency is key, to show users that their donations are not misused. Sphare will always report how much donations it received and how this money is used, for instance for operating costs and salaries. Sphare is also source-available, enabling the community to know how the site functions and which information is collected. Finally, Sphare aims to have transparent moderation, without shadow bans or unexplained content removal.

Another long term goal of Sphare is to give more control to the communities, by enabling them to select their moderators, define their rules and leverage their help to deal with bots and bad actors. The exact implementation of these mechanisms is not yet defined but the general idea is to have a vote based system that gives more weight to strong and regular contributors of each community to avoid communities being hijacked.

Sphare is still in its beginnings and additional features will come in the future, such as direct messages, better moderation tools, additional filters and configuration and many more. I hope you enjoy Sphare and will help us grow into the best possible platform!