NorthStar Social believes that everyone has a fundamental right to privacy and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice it to communicate online. Our social app is designed to restore the excitement of connecting with family and friends, focusing on user ownership and control over their contacts (social graphs) and data. We take an innovative approach with a local-first paradigm to keep your social interactions private and out of the hands of corporations. Local-first keeps your information with you on your devices.

We believe...providing people agency to privately control their social graphs and data leads to more personal, meaningful, and authentic online interactions.

We envision...a social platform that connects people, free from corporate and political control and exploit.

NorthStar Social is built on a local-first decentralized architecture where data resides on your devices. Our app communicates over open standards not controlled by any one corporate interest. NorthStar Social’s privacy-by-design approach, coupled with our Social Network Relay Protocol (SNRP) and the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) decentralized standard, keeps data in the hands of its users—on NorthStar Social, you truly own all your data.

A local-first approach restores agency over your connections and social posts and opens the door to new possibilities never before imagined with traditional cloud-based social platforms. Your social connections and interactions are always available whether you are connected to the Internet or out hiking in the wilderness--post your experiences as they occur. When NorthStar Social detects connectivity, it automatically sends them for you.

Traditional social networks are closed, proprietary, Cloud-exclusive platforms owned and controlled by corporations that exploit our information to maximize their owners' bottom line. They store our connections and social data unencrypted on their servers and use it to enrich themselves by targeting advertisements and information unrelated to why many of us joined these social networks in the first place—to connect with the people in our lives. Terms of service are complicated, difficult to understand, and change frequently. Algorithms are tuned to manipulate the feeds that we see, oftentimes leading us to the most enraging, engagement-bait content and away from the content of our true connections. These social networks have purposely made it difficult to switch to another platform, forcing us to leave our connections and content behind.

The decentralized social platforms that Bluesky and Mastodon have pioneered changes all of that. With Bluesky’s emerging open standard, AT Protocol, you create a universal social identity on the decentralized network that establishes the foundation for portability and interoperability. What does this means for you? Should an app or company on the Atmosphere change the rules on you, you can take your identity, social graph, and social data with you to another without losing your social presence. With nearly 30+ million users on Bluesky and other Atmosphere apps, decentralization is the future direction of our online social interactions.

NorthStar Social builds upon the decentralization movement to address private social interactions that are absent in these platforms. We’re combining industry standards, emerging protocols, and local-first practices to provide the infrastructure required for the most secure, privacy-focused social interactions possible.

NorthStar Social is a local-first decentralized platform with a focus on complete privacy and data security. We emphasize personal connections and rich story sharing, without the spotlight of the global stage while providing access to public content on the Atmosphere.

Bluesky, and other Atmosphere apps, are cloud-based decentralized platforms for micro-blogging on current trends, topics and news in the public sphere. They emphasize short, quick public online conversation—without options for privacy and data security. All your data is public and available to anyone in the world.

With NorthStar Social, you have access to both your private and public social networks directly from within the app.

You join NorthStar Social using the same decentralized social identity you would use on Bluesky or any other Atmosphere App built on AT Protocol. If you already have one, there will be nothing more to do other than download NorthStar Social onto your mobile device or desktop computer. We plan to host a beta before our official release.

If you would like to be considered for our beta, fill out our beta interest form and we will keep you posted.