About Gather
The internet was optimized for everyone but you.
It was gradually tuned for platforms, algorithms, and advertisers. Gather is what happens when you optimize it for people again - a social platform where a "tip" replaces a like, and the money is real when it lands.
What Gather is
A social platform where a tip replaces a like.
The feed is chronological. No ranking system decides what you see, how you feel, or who gets found - you do. And when something is useful, funny, or good, you don't tap a heart. You send the person actual money. Usually pennies. Sometimes more. There's a real wallet in the app, and the money is real when it lands.
That single swap changes the economics of the whole thing. Attention stops being the product. Usefulness starts being the point. Creators get paid the day they post, by the people who actually valued the work - not eighteen months later by an advertiser.
Under the hood, payments run on Bitcoin's layer-two rails, where sending someone ten cents actually makes economic sense. That's plumbing, not personality - Gather is a social platform, not a crypto product.
What we're changing
Same internet. Different defaults.
An algorithm decides what you see
→You decide what you see
A like is free, so it's worthless
→A tip costs something, so it means something
Build an audience now, monetize someday
→Get paid the day you post
$0.001 from an advertiser
→$0.10 or more from an actual human
Followers you'll never meet
→A tribe you'll sit in a room with
The four principles
What we stand on.
Be Your Own Algorithm™
Individual agency
Social media promised to connect the world. What it built instead was a machine that ranks your life for someone else's ad revenue and rewards whatever provokes - because outrage holds attention better than value does. We ended up smaller, more isolated, more divided.
Our answer isn't a better algorithm. It's no algorithm - a chronological feed, interests you choose, and a search bar. Basic, on purpose. The person scrolling is in charge, and what rises is value-ranked by your tribe, not by a company.
Tip Anyone, for Anything
Value-based exchange
A "like" costs nothing, which is exactly why it's worth nothing. Tapping without digesting isn't engagement - it's a feedback loop that degrades what gets made and drowns out the people making genuinely valuable work.
So we let people signal value directly: tip anyone, for anything, in micropayments. A creator earns $0.10 instantly from a tip instead of $0.001 from an ad view. A reader pays a dime for the one thing they want instead of $15 a month for a subscription they'll forget to cancel. The math works from both ends.
Find Your Tribe™
Meaningful connection
Once you choose what you see and pay for what you value, something useful falls out of it: you can tell who actually shares your interests - not who clicked follow, but who put money behind the same wonderfully specific corner of the world you care about.
That's a tribe. Not an audience, not a network. A group of people who demonstrated what they care about instead of announcing it.
Create Third Spaces
Real-life community
The real loss of the past twenty years isn't privacy - it's the third space. The coffee shop, the bar, the practice room, the meetup. We were promised a virtual version and traded away the local kind, and we're more connected and more alone than ever.
So we treat online as the on-ramp, not the destination. Find the people, find your tribe, then go meet them - start clubs, start meetups, build spaces that mirror your online connections. The best thing a social platform can produce is a room that fills up in real life.
What we believe
The convictions underneath it all.
Your attention is yours.
It belongs to the person paying it, not to a system that decides on their behalf.
Belonging beats following.
A platform should help you find your people, not just count them.
If you made something worth something, you should be paid.
Directly, by the people who think so - not someday, by an advertiser.
Technology should push people toward each other.
In real life - not stand in for it.
Time-in-feed is not a measure of a good life.
And it's a poor measure of a good product. We'd rather be the platform you leave to go do something real.
Who Gather is for
The people the algorithm buried.
People who make things worth paying for and are tired of building an audience first and getting paid later - musicians, cooks, coaches, writers, mechanics, teachers, and the deeply specific experts no feed ever surfaced.
And the people who'd rather hand a creator a dollar than hand a platform their attention. Not a crypto crowd - a frustrated-with-social crowd that happens to be fine with the payment rail.
How we sound
Human. Independent. Curious. Provocative, not inflammatory. Optimistic, not naive. Countercultural, not ideological.
Gather is for something, not against everything. We're not here to tell you social media is terrible - we're here to ship the version where people keep the control, the connection, and the money.
Meet the team
The people building it.
Gather is built by Stri Labs. Get to know the team behind it.
Own your attention. Reward people directly. Find your people. Connect in real life.
That's the whole idea. If it sounds like the internet you actually wanted, come build it with us.