Documentation
Everything you need to install Social Home, understand how it works, and run a federation relay if you want to.
Social Home is a private, federated household social network that lives in your home — you install it as a Home Assistant add-on. It’s two things at once: a household OS — calendar, shopping list, presence, photos — and a federated social fabric — feeds, DMs, and shared spaces that span the people you actually know.
These docs are written for people who run their household, not for protocol engineers. Every page opens in plain language; the technical detail sits in collapsible “Under the hood” blocks you can skip or open. The deeper material lives in the GitHub spec.
Start here
- Getting started — add the Social Home add-on to Home Assistant in about five minutes.
- Words we use — household, space, scope, GFS, pairing: the dozen words that come up everywhere.
- How it works — what Social Home does for you, with concrete examples.
- Privacy model — what stays on your server and what (very little) leaves it.
- Security model — what is sealed, what is signed, what the relay can still see, and what isn’t solved yet.
Features
- Calendar & RSVPs — everyone’s calendars in one view. Reply yes / no / maybe, even to a household you’ve paired with.
- Highlights — share a photo or short clip that quietly disappears. No archive in someone else’s data centre.
- Momentum — a quick post that travels to friends and their friends, then fades on its own.
- Marketplace — sell, give away, or auction things inside a space, with no strangers and no fees.
- Family safety — protected accounts for kids, age-gated spaces and apps, and a read-only guardian view.
Go deeper
- Households, federated — pair another household, share spaces.
- Global spaces — discoverable rooms via a relay you trust.
- Run a relay yourself — VPS + Cloudflare, ~15 minutes.