Porchkeep

A dating app for one city · one of the questions

Who in this city knows your order?

Everyone in the city gets that one, on the same day. Thirty seconds of voice, or 240 characters. Then you read a wall of what people wrote.

No swipe. No like button. No reading of where you are.

Not open yet Nothing to download and no list to join.

See how it works

The Today screen of the Porchkeep app. A question in a blue band, then one member's answer: a printed portrait, the name and neighbourhood in a solid blue bar beneath the picture, the answer set in a serif, and a single button reading Knock.
The built app on the test city it ships with. Nobody has answered anything yet, and nobody in it is a real person.

The whole product, in four numbers

1 question a day
The same one for everyone in the city.
30 seconds of voice
Or 240 characters, if you would rather type.
3 knocks a day
The same three whether or not you pay. Back at midnight.
6 seats at a table
What a conversation turns into, if it turns into anything.

Not in it

Absences are checkable from outside.

  • A swipe

    The gesture is not in the app. Reading is scrolling, and an answer you have nothing to say to just goes past.

  • A like button

    Nothing registers approval of a person. A reader's opinion never becomes a number stuck to a writer.

  • Blurred messages

    A Knock arrives whole, in the sender's own words and voice. The design system has no blur primitive.

  • Timers

    Nothing expires. A conversation does not die while you are at work, and no seat is released by a clock.

  • A paid position in anyone's wall

    The ranking engine is never handed the list of who pays. A test ranks one city twice, everybody marked a supporter and then nobody, and demands identical output down to the reasons.

  • Any reading of where you are

    The app imports no location framework and asks for no location permission. The Info.plist carries no usage string, because there is no call to describe.

Both answers, or neither

Any pair gets two numbers. How likely you are to reply to them. Then, with the roles swapped through the same code, how likely they are to open the door.

The two are combined with a harmonic mean, which is harsh on lopsided pairs on purpose. A small number has a large reciprocal, so the weaker of the two directions sets the result.

Nine-in-ten one way and one-in-ten the other averages to five-in-ten. Combined this way the same pair lands at one-point-eight in ten, next to the smaller of the two numbers rather than between them. A one-sided crush does not survive it.

The harmonic mean of a lopsided pair, printed as a tally A ledger of three runs of ink, each measured in tenths against the same ten cells. The first run, in Federal Blue, is nine tenths and is labelled "you would reply". The second, in Brick, is one tenth and is labelled "they would open the door". Above a heavy rule stands the working, 2 over one ninth plus one. Under the rule the total is one and eight tenths, printed in the overprint and labelled "the harmonic mean". A measure below the total shows where an average of the two would have landed instead, at five tenths, most of the way along a line the total barely starts. You would reply 9 They would open the door 1 2 1/9 + 1/1 The harmonic mean 1.8 An average would say 5
The pair 9 and 1, in tenths, as the code runs it.

A knock, then maybe a table

A thread in the Porchkeep app. A Knock has arrived in full, in the sender's own words, quoted against the answer it replies to.

The only thing you can send is a Knock. A reply pinned to one specific answer, in your words or your voice, and it arrives whole. Three a day, back at local midnight, the same three whether or not you pay.

Whoever you knocked on decides whether the door opens. Nobody else does.

A Table in the Porchkeep app. Six seats, a place and a time, with the seats shown as a row of marks rather than a list of faces.

What a conversation can turn into is a Table. Six seats. A place and a time.

How it works

Where this stands

Porchkeep has not opened. No account exists yet, and this site does not describe a service that is running today.

Three pages here have to be public before anything opens, and each one is reachable without an account from the bottom of every page.

Everything else the product will and will not do with what you write is set out in one place.

Read the Trust Centre