Hearth is your social life, in one place — one login and many rooms. Every side of your life — your hobby, your profession, your family, your friends — gets its own space, with its own members, rules, and culture. You show up as a different profile in each: a craft persona in one room, a professional in another, just Dad at the family table, just you among friends.

If you want a familiar map: Reddit's user-created communities crossed with Facebook's real-life circles. What makes Hearth different is three commitments neither makes — per-space personas, collaboration built in (crews and role slots, not just comments), and trust rails: vouching runs through everything, from products to endorsements to moderation.

A space is a room you run: a collective, a professional network, a family, a photo circle, or anything else. Spaces are created from templates — proven setups like Collective, Professional, or Family — or from scratch, and every module in them can be toggled at any time. Nobody needs the platform team's permission to open one.

Spaces choose who's welcome: public, invite-only (existing members can vouch you in), or fully private. A private space's content never leaves the room — albums in a family space are visible to the family, period.

Public means readable: anyone can browse a public space without joining — lurk, learn the culture, decide if it's for you. Participating — posting, liking, RSVPing, joining crews, messaging members — requires joining. Reading is free; membership is the signature on the house rules.

Templates cover the ground the big platforms claim, on your terms: a photo commons that's chronological and ad-free; a short-video space whose front page is picked by rotating human curators, not an engagement algorithm; a professional network where experience, endorsements, and opportunities live with your work persona — and recruiters never reach your family one.

Every space declares how its people relate, and that model shapes everything downstream — what a feed is, who a post reaches, what joining means. Most people never create a space; they join one big room and relate to individuals inside it, and the model is what makes that feel right.

Follow graph — one big room; you follow individuals and your feed is who you follow (Lens, The Tube). Mutual circle — everyone in the room is connected and everything reaches everyone (a family, a close-friends circle). Connections — mutual ties made one at a time, like colleagues (Work, Swiftly Engineering Alums). Roles — structured positions relating to each other: vendors and shoppers, teachers and learners (the farmers markets). Open commons — membership first, follows as an optional overlay (Seattle Area Makers). A space picks its model at creation, and modules adapt to it.

You set up one base profile — a name, a place, a line about yourself. Each space you join dresses it into a persona for that room: your professional network sees an experience timeline; your family just sees you. Nothing crosses between rooms unless you carry it.

Personas are layered. Beneath each space persona sits a typed profile — professional, social, family — authored once and worn by every space of that type: your professional commons, your design network, and your company all dress the same professional profile. Profile modules attach at that layer — an experience timeline, a featured business catalog, a shelf of favorites drawn from catalogs your connections carry — and a module appears in a space only when three gates agree: you enabled it, the space wears that profile type and allows the module, and the viewer stands in the right relationship with you at the Hearth level. Connections themselves can attach to a typed profile, which is what "professionally connected" means.

Your interests tune which spaces Hearth suggests, and they're never public.

An organization — a farm, a bakery, a company, a nonprofit, a maker co-op, a market hall — is not a person, and Hearth never pretends it is. It's a business Humans operate: it has a profile (catalog, hours, confirmations), operators (Humans in named roles, acting through their professional personas), and sometimes a home space of its own. When a business acts — confirming a market date, listing a product — the record carries both names: the business it was for, and the Human who took the action.

Catalogs belong to businesses, never to people — even a one-person shop is a one-minute business, so nothing has to migrate when it grows. People feature a business's catalog on their own profiles with the business's permission — some catalogs are open to anyone, some by request, some invite-only: the member-owners of a co-op, the stockist a bakery trusts, the maker carrying their own shop. One catalog, many carriers — the carrier's name rides with it, orders and stock truth stay the business's, and if the business changes its mind the catalog detaches promptly.

A business's reputation traces to its operators. Vouches earned by the people who run it don't silently transfer if the business changes hands — trust belongs to Humans, and new owners earn their own.

Every space has its own feed — posts, photos, clips, events, project calls. The Your feed river merges activity from all your spaces into one place, with each item badged by the room it came from, filterable by space. Wherever you reply, you reply as whoever you are in that space.

Following is per-space: you follow the personas you choose in each room, and following @junethrows in a video space says nothing about June anywhere else. Every post picks its audience — everyone in the space, or just your followers there; followers-only posts never appear in Explore or to anyone who doesn't follow you. Small private rooms like a family or photo circle skip the choice entirely: everything goes to everyone in the room.

Three scopes, three privacy levels. Space rooms are open to the whole space and follow its rules and moderation. Direct messages inside a space are persona-to-persona: someone who knows your video handle can message it without ever learning your other names. Hearth DMs sit outside every space, between base profiles — they exist only when both people opt in.

All DMs are end-to-end encrypted, and AI moderation never reads them. The only way a DM reaches a moderator is when a participant reports it and chooses what to share.

Post what you want to do, name the roles you need, and let the space fill your crew. Filled roles and open ones are visible at a glance; finished projects become stories that credit everyone who pitched in. The same mechanism runs a community kiln build, a paid exhibition crew, a school fundraiser, or a surprise birthday party.

Any space can turn on a shop. What renders there is a business's catalog, featured by someone the business allows — a ceramics studio, a bakery, a co-op alike. Sellers list what's in stock, what's made to order, and whether they take commissions; the counts are the business's single truth wherever the catalog appears. And sellers showcase work from other sellers they vouch for — complementary products, each vouch carrying a personal note about why. Trust is the marketplace's currency: the sale belongs to the business, the vouch belongs to the voucher — a named Human, always.

Modules aren't code — they're compositions of Hearth's primitives: typed objects, views, action pairs, role slots, notifications. That's why anyone can make one, nothing can crash the platform, and a small team can keep the lights on.

Describe what your space needs and the AI composes it; keep it private, install it anywhere you're an admin, or publish it to the registry. Community modules are vouched by the spaces that run them, maintained by named stewards, forkable by anyone — and when a steward moves on, the AI keeps the module healthy until someone adopts it.

Modules attach at four levels — and every module says which. Space modules shape a room and are installed by its admins. Profile modules attach to a typed profile — an experience timeline, a featured business catalog, a favorites shelf — and appear in every space of that type that allows them, visible to viewers who hold the right relationship with you. Business modules attach to a business itself: catalog connectors like a Shopify sync, wholesale inquiries — managed by its operators, inherited by every profile featuring the catalog, traveling with the business rather than any person or space. Personal modules — like a calendar connection — attach to you and travel with your persona across spaces. Integrations map external data into Hearth primitives; the platform team maintains the connector rails (auth, sync, sandbox), the mappings are declarative and community-shared, and the outside service stays the source of truth — which means the data leaves with its owner too.

AI triages every report — instantly, consistently, with its reasoning shown. It hides obvious spam pending confirmation, but it never removes speech on its own: judgment calls go to human moderators, and craft disputes route to peer experts in the space. Every action is logged, explained, and reversible, and every author can appeal.

The AI also opens and reads every external link before it posts — catching scam storefronts, phishing, and counterfeits of members' work that a bare URL hides. Spaces can adopt content house rules like banning news & current events: posts are declined at post time with a friendly pointer to spaces where they fit — no penalty, nothing on the author's record. And think-twice nudges give authors a private heads-up before a heated post goes up; the author always keeps the final call, and moderators never see drafts — only the tally.

Rules are per-space — a family room and a marketplace run very different books. The built-ins are only the floor: everything above it is a filter the space chose — written in plain language by its own mods or added from the community registry, interpreted by AI (asking about edge cases before enforcing), version-pinned, and published in the space's house rules so members always know what their mods decided.

Filters are how a space writes its own rules — and like modules, they're community-made. A filter is a plain-language rule the AI enforces: decline at post time with a friendly pointer, hold for a human, nudge the author privately, or route to a peer expert. That's the whole menu. The platform floor guarantees no filter ever removes speech on its own, and every action one takes is logged, explained, and appealable.

Anyone can compose a filter in the Studio, keep it private, or publish it to the registry — where it's vouched by the spaces that run it, maintained by named stewards, forkable by anyone, and adoptable when a steward moves on. Spaces add any number and pin the version; updates are opt-in, so a room's rules never change under its members' feet.

Each filter declares what it may read: posts, member profiles as they render in a space, or both. A space that adds one turns on any part of that declaration — never more than the filter declares. A family room might hold solicitation or adult language out of the profiles shown there. What's held hides in that space only — the profile's owner is told exactly what and why, can appeal to a human, and stands untouched everywhere else.