How it works

Social Home gives your home the household OS your phone never managed to be: shared calendars, a live shopping list, photos, voice notes, presence, and chat — all running on hardware you already own. It also lets your household connect to other households the same way you’d add a friend on any other network, only without giving anyone’s data to a company in the middle.

This page walks through what you can actually do with it. No acronyms in the main text; the technical detail sits in the “Under the hood” blocks, and the words are in Words we use.

What can I do with it?

Stay connected with the people who matter — without giving your data to anyone else. Here’s what Social Home lets you and your household do:

• 📸 Share a photo of dinner on your household feed. Your partner sees it instantly on their phone, your flatmates can react and comment — all without it going through any cloud service.
• 🗓 See everyone’s calendar in one place. Your personal calendar, your flatmate’s schedule, and the shared “House” calendar overlay in one colour-coded view. Events stay on your server.
• 🛒 Shout “I’m at the supermarket — anything needed?” Your household shopping list is live. Someone adds milk, you see it before you reach the checkout. Ask your voice assistant to add it by speaking.
• 🔔 Know when people are home without asking. A quiet presence indicator shows who’s around right now — no location tracking, no history, just the current moment.
• ✅ Split chores instead of nagging. Task lists with assignees, deadlines, and an overdue badge. Drill the bookshelf this weekend; recycle the old fridge today; everyone sees who has what.
• 📒 Keep the house manual in one place. Pages are Markdown wiki entries that live inside a Space — how to bleed the radiators, where the meter readings go, the babysitter handover. They sync across every household device.
• 📝 Stickies for the things that don’t deserve a page. Colourful tap-to-edit notes pinned to a Space canvas — the modern fridge magnet. Carrots in the bottom drawer; birthday gift ideas; the doorbell-fix shopping list.
• 💬 Message your family across the world — sealed from your home to theirs, with no cloud in between. No phone numbers. No account on a third-party service.
• 📞 Call without a stranger in the middle — voice and video calls, 1:1 or with a group, straight from your DMs and group chats. The audio and video flow directly between participants; if a direct connection can’t be made, a relay passes the stream through but only ever sees encrypted media.
• 🏘 Build your own community, your way — create a Space for any group: your street, apartment building, sports team, or maker club. Organise a neighbourhood BBQ, run a book club — in a private place that no big tech company can read, monetise, or shut down. Everyone keeps their own server.
• 🔨 Run a marketplace — list things you want to give away or sell to people you already know. No strangers, no platform fees.
• 🎙 Transcribe a voice note from a microphone in the house and post it to the feed — useful when your hands are full.

Under the hood

Calls are WebRTC with DTLS-SRTP between participants; a TURN fallback relays ciphertext only. Direct messages are encrypted server-to-server (AES-256-GCM envelopes, Ed25519 signatures).

Your data stays yours

Everything Social Home knows lives in your home, on your own server. The photos, the messages, the shopping list, the calendar entries — all in a small database on your machine. There is no cloud account, no analytics, no advertising network, no remote logger watching what your household says. If your internet goes down, the household features keep working on your LAN; the only thing that pauses is messaging outside the house.

Under the hood

If you installed the add-on, it is part of your normal Home Assistant backup; standalone installs get a Recovery Kit (.shrk, scrypt + AES-256-GCM) for the keys.

Connecting with other households

You connect two homes by scanning a QR code — in the app it’s called pairing. After that, the two servers know each other and can carry direct messages and shared spaces between them. The QR code carries a public key — like a digital ID card — that lets the other side verify it’s still you, even if your address changes later.

What you share with a paired household: your display name, your avatar, and the spaces you join together.

What you never share: passwords, emails, your location history, or anything that lives in a space you didn’t both join.

Under the hood

Each household generates an Ed25519 identity key on first start. Pairing is X25519 + HKDF-SHA256, authenticated by the QR code or a short spoken code. Every incoming envelope’s signature is checked against the pairing; a bad signature is dropped, and there is no trusted-instance mode to bypass that.

Spaces — shared rooms for any group

A Space is a shared feed, chat, and calendar for any group of people, across any number of households. Think:

• Family — the people in your house, plus parents and siblings in their own homes.
• Eichenstrasse 3–17 — your apartment block. Everyone runs their own server; the space is the shared notice board.
• Book club, bouldering crew, maker space — the recurring groups that already exist in your life, just not on any platform that’s worth trusting.

You decide who sees a space. You decide which households are invited. Every space has a host household — the one that created it and keeps the member list — but members post straight to each other, and the big decisions (who can see it, whether it still exists) are taken by all its admins together.

Public and global spaces

Some spaces are private to invited households. A public space is one your paired households can find and ask to join; it stays inside your own circle. A global space — a public marketplace, a hobby community, a neighbourhood notice board — is for strangers too: the owner picks one or more lightweight relays, GFSs (Global Federation Servers), that list it so households who don’t know each other can find it (see GFS).

Paired households always get a space’s posts directly or over the mesh. The relay only carries posts to households you aren’t paired with — followers, and members who joined with a GFS link — as sealed, padded envelopes, and every listed GFS gets every post. It can’t read a word, and members post anonymously. More in Global spaces.

Under the hood

Only a global space is ever listed on a GFS, and only on the GFSs in its owner-signed gfs_servers list (at most 8). Public spaces reach paired households as a SPACE_DIRECTORY_SYNC snapshot and never touch a GFS. Members publish anonymously to every listed GFS. The GFS sees routing metadata only (space_id, event_type, size bucket, timing, subscriber set, source IP); strict mode makes publishes identity-free. Offline members are queued 24 h; nothing else is stored.

Public highlight links

The same kind of relay also has a second job: handing off a single highlight to people outside Social Home. When you publish a highlight link, the relay mints a URL that anyone can open in a browser — but the highlight bytes flow directly from your home server to the visitor’s browser. If that direct path can’t be made, the relay passes the frames through only while you’re online, and stores none of them. See Highlights for the author-facing flow.

Under the hood

WebRTC-direct from the author’s server to the browser; HTTP pass-through as fallback only while the author is online. Zero highlight or moment bytes are stored on the GFS.

Encryption, always on

Every message that leaves your server is sealed in an envelope only the receiving households can open — always, with no switch to turn it off and no plaintext fallback. Even the relay can’t see inside. Think of it like an envelope that only the people on the guest list have keys for — the postal service routes it, but never opens it. The security model page says exactly what that does and doesn’t cover.

Privacy at a glance

• ✅ Every message encrypted on the wire — always on, no opt-out
• ✅ No ads, no tracking, no analytics
• ✅ GPS is opt-in per device
• ✅ Your server, your rules
• ✅ Open source under MPL 2.0

How connections work (for the curious)

Each home running Social Home generates a unique cryptographic identity on first boot — the equivalent of a digital ID card. When two households pair, they exchange these IDs and verify each other’s signatures whenever a message arrives. After that one-time handshake, the two servers can talk directly: a message you send to your sister appears in her home the same second, with no relay in the middle.

If a household’s address changes (you move, your IP rotates, or you switch to a domain), the new address is announced to all its paired households automatically — your sister’s home notes the move and keeps the connection alive.

Running a global space relay

If you want to host a discovery relay for a community, it’s a small Python server that runs on a VPS — see run a relay yourself. Open source, licensed MPL 2.0, no fees.