Handbill
Person-to-person social networking
Are you tired of commercial social networks sucking your will to live?
Have you been discouraged from trying new social networks because none of your friends are there?
Do you want a lightweight way to keep in touch with friends without being bombarded with commercial garbage?
Handbill is a free, open source app for social networking which runs over email instead of the web.
How does it work?
Step 0.
Do I want to use this?
If you want high-security messaging with a few select people, then for the love of all that is holy, use Signal.
If you need to fill a void in your soul by seeking mindless approval from strangers, then use Twitter.
If you want to casually keep in touch with friends, relatives, and acquaintances, then this could be the tool for you. Connect with a few people, or a few dozen people.
Handbill is free, open source software. There are no ads, no metrics, and no company in the middle… your own email account is the whole infrastructure. Your email provider will get the metadata of who you’re communicating with, but they won’t see any encrypted content between users.
Step 1.
Connect with friends over existing email
Before your first post reaches someone, Handbill sends an invitation to their normal email address. They can opt-in to seeing your social content, and can filter different topics from you.
Every message after that carries the same quiet controls: stop one topic, slow things down to once a day, or silence you altogether. Nobody is subscribed by accident and nobody has to install anything to leave.
Handbill App (Clark Kent)
Email Client (Bruce Wayne)
Step 2.
You post from the app.
They read it in their inbox.
On your phone, Handbill looks like a normal social feed. When you post, your friends who don’t have the app will see an ordinary, readable email from you: the photo at the top, your words, a Like button at the bottom. For them, there is no account, no app, nothing to install. (These messages won’t be encrypted).
They will receive updates at a civilized pace. Handbill gathers what you have posted and what your friends have said into one letter per person, a few times a day at most, and only when you open the app.
No torture of constant “reply all” notifications. And they can silence the conversation at any time, right from their email client.
Email Client (Bruce Wayne)
Handbill Client (Clark Kent)
Step 3.
They reply from their inbox.
You see a conversation.
A friend hits Reply in email, or taps Comment, and their words show up as a comment under your post, in a thread, the way you would expect.
Other users will see the comment sent out in update digests. Since the messages all go through you, there is no storm of reply-alls. They can click “Like” and then send for a quick thumbs-up.
Email Client (Bruce Wayne)
Handbill App (Clark Kent)
Step 4.
If your friends install the app too.
If both of you run Handbill, you will both see your conversations in a familiar social networking feed. These posts and replies are all signed and encrypted, end to end.
Handbill App, with encryption
(Clark Kent)
Handbill App, with encryption
(Bruce Wayne)
The design is simple. The technology is trivial (thank you, Claude!). The real work will be in establishing a culture of non-clueless sharing. Participate if this sounds good to you.
Handbill is currently in alpha testing. Beta testing should begin around October 2026. Beta testers are encouraged to use a new or spare email account in case a bug deletes stuff it shouldn’t. (Also, an “app password” is required rather than your normal email password… instructions are included for how to find these). So far we’ve been using gmail to test everything and that seems to work well.
The beta will run on iPhone and Android.