The things people actually ask — including the skeptical ones. If a question isn't here, ask us.
We'd rather answer the hard questions ourselves than let them go unanswered. Where something isn't settled yet, we say so.
porchstroll will be a Maryland nonstock nonprofit corporation — the Articles aren't filed yet, and we'll post them here when they are. We are not a 501(c)(3), and we've decided not to seek that status. It's a federal tax exemption, and we'd rather not spend years arguing to the IRS that a general-purpose social network is a charity. The mission protection we care about comes from the nonprofit corporate form itself: no shareholders, and a legal rule against distributing surplus to insiders.
The practical consequences you should know: gifts to porchstroll are not tax-deductible, we file IRS Form 1120 rather than a public Form 990, and you won't find us in a charity database like Candid or Charity Navigator — those run on 990 data. What we publish instead is on the transparency page.
More on the reasoning is on the main page and the governance page.
Nonprofit means no owners profit — not that no money changes hands. Subscriptions, paid storage because storage costs us money, marketplace fees, and a small, limited amount of non-targeted advertising. To fund the start, we're building a paid email app — it hasn't shipped yet, so it hasn't earned anything so far. The full picture is on the transparency page.
There's no owner to sell, and no shares to buy. Surplus can't be paid out to insiders, the purpose will be written into the Articles of Incorporation, and a majority-independent board is what will guard against quiet reversals. That's the whole reason for the nonprofit structure — a promise you can change on a whim isn't worth much.
Yes — a limited number, and not the kind you're used to. Sponsored posts are clearly labeled, capped at no more than one in every eight posts, and the same size as a normal post. There's no comment section on them, and the links go to clean destinations with no tracking attached.
The crucial part: we don't build a profile on you to target them. Ads are matched to the city or state you gave us — never to you as an individual. There's no behavioural profile to target with, which is why this isn't restraint on our part: the capability doesn't exist. Advertisers never see who you are, and we never follow you around to measure it. That's why we say "no tracking, no profiling, no selling you" rather than "no ads."
No. We don't sell it, rent it, or share it with advertisers or data brokers. We collect as little as we can to run the service, and what we hold stays here. This isn't a policy we can quietly change — not selling you is the entire point of the organization.
No engagement-maximizing algorithm. Your feed shows posts from the people and groups you follow — not whatever an AI predicts will keep you scrolling or wind you up. The goal is a calm neighborhood, not a slot machine.
No. We don't harvest your posts or messages to train AI models. Any automated tools we use are narrow — for example, helping human moderators triage reports — and never a substitute for people making the real decisions.
It gets deleted — not sold. If porchstroll ever winds down, we'll give you clear notice and a window to export everything you've put here. After that, your data is deleted. It is not treated as an asset, it is not handed to creditors, and it is not passed to whoever might buy what's left. Being straight with you: the precise legal mechanism that guarantees this even through an insolvency is something we're still working out — see the governance page.
On the money side: whatever funds remain after obligations are settled go to a mission-aligned nonprofit — privacy, digital rights, or community infrastructure. The non-distribution rule holds all the way to the end. Neither the founder nor anyone else here walks away with it. The full detail is on the governance page.
Private conversations are private — we don't proactively scan them. A conversation is only ever reviewed if someone inside it reports it, and then a real person looks, not an algorithm. To be precise about what that does and doesn't mean: messages are encrypted in transit, but this is not end-to-end encryption, so it isn't a claim that we're technically incapable of reading them. It's a rule about what we do, backed by the structure that makes breaking it pointless — and it applies across porchstroll's apps, including porchstroll passion. We've also kept messaging text-only by design, which removes an entire category of abuse rather than trying to police it after the fact.
The privacy-respecting options today tend to be either nonprofit-but-technical (hard for most people to use) or easy-but-for-profit (still answerable to owners or investors). porchstroll aims for the gap: a nonprofit, general-purpose, genuinely easy-to-use network. The structure and the simplicity together are the point.
Not quite. We're pre-launch and opening the porch slowly. You can join the waitlist on the main site and we'll invite you in when there's room.
Right now, the most direct way is to buy the email app once it's out — it funds the incorporation and legal groundwork. Joining the waitlist and telling a friend helps too. If formal donations open up later, we'll say so here.
porchstroll is founder-led, and the independent board described on the governance page isn't seated yet. The clearest answer to "who" and "why" is in the founder's letter.
Still wondering about something? Ask us directly.