Initial problem
Most of the photos on your phone are not for everyone. They are for three people, or five, or one - the people in the frame and the people who love them. But the tools we use to share those moments treat every photo as content for the world. Feeds, reactions, algorithms, strangers. Originals end up trapped in someone else's cloud, surrounded by metrics designed to keep you posting. There is no quiet place for the handful of pictures that belong to a handful of people.
Implementation
beisammen is built for exactly that audience. You share with a named circle - a partner, family, a few close friends - and the app keeps the rest of the internet out. It is a bring-your-own-storage app: the metadata, shared views and invitations live on beisammen's servers, but the full-resolution originals stay in an S3-compatible bucket of your choice - your own, your family's, or an official one. The backend is fully self-hostable for circles that want to run everything on their own hardware. Source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial. No feed, no strangers, no lock-in, no theater.
Outcome
My contribution
Impact
What mattered
Named circles instead of a social graph - every person is someone you personally invited
Bring-your-own-storage: originals live in an S3-compatible bucket you control
Compatible with AWS S3, Backblaze, Wasabi, MinIO, Hetzner and Garage
Fully self-hostable for circles that want to run everything themselves
No feed, no algorithm, no reactions swelling into numbers, no streaks
Source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial - readable, private
Coming to iOS and Android, built to be used quietly
Insights
The beisammen landing page - a quiet editorial frame for a handful of moments
Technical frame
The technical frame sits at the end on purpose: it shows the engineering substance behind the solution.
Next project
The local sandbox control plane.
View project