What makes r/Cairn_Net different?

Most "private" social apps ask you to trust a company's promise. Cairn is built so there's less to trust in the first place. Here's what's different:

**1. No account to hand over**

There's no email, phone number or username to sign up with. Your identity is a cryptographic key that lives on your devices, unlocked with a passkey or passphrase. Nobody can reset it, lock you out, or sell a profile they never had.

**2. Private means encrypted, not "we promise"**

Direct messages, group chats, shared files and voice/video calls are end-to-end encrypted. The servers carry them but can't read them. Calls are relayed by default so the other person never learns your IP address.

**3. Servers that know as little as possible**

Cairn's servers (relays) don't log IP addresses. Your contacts and private follows stay on your devices, synced between them in encrypted form.

**4. Handles you prove you own: new this week**

You can now get a handle like **you@yourdomain.com** by adding one DNS record (or one small file) to a domain you control. Anyone seeing your posts gets a verified badge that proves it's really you, and people can find you or message you by that handle. It's free during the beta.

If you don't have a domain, every persona also gets an identicon: a picture generated from your key, so a copycat with the same name looks visibly different.

**5. Public posts you can check**

Public posts are anchored to a tamper-evident chain, so anyone can verify a post existed in its original form at a given time.

**6. Your persona moves with you**

Add a phone or laptop with a QR code or encrypted sync, and keep a backup file for anything else. There's no password reset, which is the trade-off for having no accounts, so keep that backup safe.

**Where it stands**

Cairn is in early beta. The web app is live at **app.cairnnet.com**, and an Android app is in testing. Things will break and change, and your feedback shapes what comes next.

Try it, then tell me here what you liked, what confused you, and what you wish it did. And if you have a domain, get your handle verified and show off the badge.