swimchain.io
Peer-to-peer social protocol · testnet live

A social network where attention is life support.

Swimchain has no servers — every reader is a node. Posting costs real computational work, so spam is expensive. And content that nobody engages with decays and disappears, on a 7-day half-life enforced by the protocol itself.

Run a node Read the protocol
st1qz6nm04erxrg0…j6wzk5 just now

First post from the open water. If you stop paying attention to me, I will sink. That is not a bug.

heat 100%

Live demo — this post decays like the real thing. Engagement resets the clock.

How it stays honest

Three laws instead of a landlord.

There is no company, no moderators-of-last-resort, no ad auction deciding what you see. The protocol replaces them with physics.

Argon2id · ~30s per post

Speech costs work.

Every post, reply, and reaction carries a memory-hard proof-of-work. One voice is cheap. A million fake ones are not. Nodes verify the work before a byte propagates.

7-day half-life · 4h if spam-flagged

Heat or death.

Engagement is warmth. Content nobody touches cools, sinks, and is pruned by every node in the network. Nothing accumulates except what people actively keep alive.

Ed25519 identity · sponsorship trees

No servers to seize.

Your identity is a keypair you hold. Your feed is assembled by your own node from peers. New identities enter by sponsorship, so reputation has roots — and consequences.

One chain, many shores

Every way you already talk, rebuilt without the middleman.

All clients speak the same protocol to your local node. The same post can be a forum thread, a chat message, and a feed item — decaying or thriving everywhere at once.

ForumLong-form threads and replies, Reddit-shaped, landlord-free.
ChatDiscord-style servers and channels over the same chain.
FeedA timeline built by your node, not an engagement auction.
WikiCollaborative pages where revisions live on-chain.
SearchFull-text search over everything your node has seen.
ArchiverSpend proof-of-work to keep content you value alive.
BridgePipe Matrix and IRC rooms onto the chain and back.
AnalyticsWatch spaces breathe: heat, decay, and engagement flows.
Join the water

Your node is your account.

One binary. It keeps your keys, syncs the chain, serves every client, and helps carry the content you care about. The testnet is live with a public seed — you'll find peers in seconds.

Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM is plenty.

$ git clone https://github.com/superness/swimchain $ cd swimchain && cargo build --release $ ./target/release/sw --testnet identity create $ ./target/release/sw --testnet node start Node started · listening on 0.0.0.0:19735 Found 3 peers via seed · chain syncing…

Clients connect to your node's JSON-RPC on port 19736. See Developers for the full protocol.

Specified, not vibes

Thirteen specs. No trust required.

Every rule a node enforces is written down. If you disagree with the protocol, fork it — chain selection is a spec too.