Eight principles. No exceptions.

Built for humans.

Open any other feed in 2026 and tell us how much of it was actually made by a person. The AI slop is everywhere. Generated faces. Generated voices. Generated lives. Recycled clips lifted from somewhere else, stitched together by something that was never there. The signal-to-noise on the internet is approaching zero, and the noise is winning.

Sapien only accepts posts from your camera roll. Not a URL. Not a paste. Not an upload from a desktop folder full of who-knows-what. The photo or video has to come off the phone in your hand — the same device that took it. That's a much harder rule than it sounds, and we hold the line because it's the only way the feed stays real.

The deeper meaning of "for humans" is that every product decision is judged against whether it makes the network feel more like a person made it or less like a person made it. The wrong answer doesn't ship.

Verified humans only. No exceptions.

Posting on Sapien requires identity verification through Stripe Identity — a government-issued ID and a live selfie, checked against the document, against itself, and against everyone else who's already on the network. One human, one account. If you can't pass the check, you can't post.

The verification data lives at Stripe, not us. We get a yes/no and a reference token. We don't see your driver's license. We don't store your selfie. You can browse Sapien without verifying — but you can't be a poster, a commenter, or a Wire byline until the network knows you're a real person standing behind your words.

The single biggest difference between Sapien and every other feed is that nobody on this one is a bot — and we mean nobody.

Membership, not advertising. Posting has a floor.

Sapien is paid for by the people who use it — through Shield, the membership tier. Browsing is free; posting, commenting, replying on Wire, and sending DMs all require an active Shield subscription on top of identity verification. A non-zero floor to post is part of how the network stays honest: it pays for the verification operations, keeps spam out, and aligns our incentives with the people on it.

The job is to stay accountable to the people on the network, not to anyone else. Whatever the business model looks like a year from now or five years from now, that's the test it has to pass: does it keep the network honest to the humans on it? If the answer ever stops being yes, we changed the wrong thing.

No algorithm. No ranking. No surprise feed.

Your feed shows the posts of the people you've explicitly added to your circles, in the order they were posted. That's the entire ranking algorithm. There is no "for you," there are no recommended accounts, there are no shadow promotions.

A feed is not a casino. The slot machine has been the worst thing to happen to the internet, and we will not build one.

End-to-end means end-to-end.

Direct messages on Sapien are encrypted with the X3DH key agreement protocol and the Double Ratchet algorithm — the same cryptographic foundation as Signal. Every message is sealed on your device before it leaves and is opened only on the recipient's device.

We do not have the keys. We cannot read your messages. We cannot be compelled to read them, because the math doesn't allow it. There is no "lawful access" path, no master key, no escrow. If you can't lose access to a message when you lose your phone, then someone else can read it — and that's not encryption.

Delete means delete.

When you delete a post, we delete the post. When you delete your account, we delete your account. Not "soft-delete," not "scheduled for review," not "retained for 90 days for analytics" — deleted. Storage objects, database rows, search indexes, the whole footprint.

Backups are the one place data may persist for a short window after deletion, because backups are how we recover from disaster. We rotate them aggressively and the data is gone within the rotation cycle.

Two circles. Strangers don't exist.

The basic unit of Sapien is the people you actually know. Your Inner Circle is the people you'd call at 2am. Your Outer Circle is the people you'd grab a drink with. There is no third circle. There are no "followers." Public broadcast is not the default; it's not even the option.

We believe most loneliness on the internet comes from being shouted at by strangers. Sapien is what happens when you remove that.

Posts can have natural lifespans.

Inside your circles, every post can be set to expire — a day, a week, a month, or never. It's your call, on a per-post basis. We're not telling you what your posts mean or how long they should live. We're giving you a switch that other networks don't.

When a post does expire, it's actually gone: removed from feeds, from your profile, and from our storage. The CDN cache flushes. The index drops it. The thumbnail goes too. There is no archive of expired content sitting on a server somewhere — that defeats the entire purpose. Wire transmissions, by contrast, are public-record by default and stay until you delete them yourself.