mygaff

The Mygaff Charter

A social network with 42 places. Choose wisely.

An offering of overwatch.report.

What this is

Mygaff is a prosocial network. It governs the quantity of association (how many people, how much reach, how much noise) and leaves the quality (what you say, to whom, in what register) to its users.

It exists because every other social platform has been engineered to remove the natural boundaries human attention depends on, and because no platform built inside the venture-capital growth gradient can give those boundaries back. Cross-cultural human practice has always built stop-cues into social technology: dinner-time, closing time, Sabbath, Lent, Ramadan, the chronological newsfeed. Modern phones are the first social technology in human history with no natural boundary built in. The pathology is the absence, not the user.

Mygaff is a partial answer to that absence, made deliberately from outside capital flow because inside it the answer cannot exist.

The architecture in one paragraph

You have 42 chairs. Each chair is one person you've welcomed into your one personal gaff (your home). The default room is the kitchen, where all your guests are. You can also create and name additional rooms (Family, Lads, Music friends, whatever) and place specific guests in them. Rooms are visible in shape (your guests see they exist, with their names and member counts) but private in contents (your guests don't see what's said in rooms they aren't in). The cap on chairs is 42, full stop. There is no other cap.

The commitments

  1. Hard cap on association. No user has more than 42 chairs. The cap holds. It cannot be raised by purchase, by tier, by milestone or by exception. It is the platform's first promise.
  2. No engagement algorithm. No feed-shaping, no recommendations, no "for you" surface. Conversation is chronological inside the room you've entered.
  3. No public counts. No follower count, no like count, no read receipts visible to others. Numbers belong to the user, not the audience.
  4. No parasocial broadcast. No public profile to crawl. Identity emerges from the rooms you share with someone, the way it does in real life.
  5. No surveillance capitalism. No ads, no third-party trackers, no sale of user data. Funding is reader-supported through overwatch.report.
  6. Full export. Users own their data and can leave with it intact. The platform cannot lock anyone in.
  7. Friction on broadcast. Sharing has cost. There is no quote-retweet primitive, no virality mechanic, no one-click amplification.
  8. Ephemeral by default. Messages age out after about 30 days unless explicitly pinned. The past does not haunt forever.
  9. Calm by default. The platform sends no notifications and never escalates urgency to win attention. Nothing pings, nothing nags. You visit when you choose.
  10. Constitutional governance. This Charter is binding. Changes to it require a stated public process. Mission drift is a known failure mode and is structurally resisted.
  11. Spoon-aware design. Every interaction assumes the user is at capacity. Hard limits, calm defaults, transparent friction. Designed for the conditions people are actually living in.

What's deferred

The Public House Bar is a planned future feature: a 150-seat civic-shaped space with internal snugs and meeting rooms, hosted by organisations (branches, parishes, councils, clubs, committees, unions). It is not in Phase 1. When it ships, the Charter is amended to include the relevant civic-side commitments. Until then, those commitments are absent because the surfaces they govern do not yet exist.

Who it is for

Anyone tired enough to want a place that respects the cap they already have. The neurodivergent community arrived at this need first; the cost-of-living crisis, work intensification, smartphone overload and the slow dissolution of third-spaces have brought everyone else with them.

Who it is not for

Anyone whose use of social platforms depends on unbounded reach, performance to strangers or audience maximisation. Mygaff is not the platform for that, and does not aspire to be.

Relationship to overwatch.report

Mygaff sits within the overwatch.report family. Reader-support funds both. For Phase 1, mygaff is the personal layer; civic publishing remains overwatch's editorial output.

Charter v0.4, 2026-07-09. Pre-launch draft.