Why one person is building a quieter social network.

I run Qira LLC out of Phoenix, AZ. My main research thread is a complexity framework I've been building — applied to traffic, language, and source code. The matching algorithm in Friends? is downstream of that work: a facet-vector representation of personality, compared the same way I compare traffic clusters or code modules.

I'm not a venture-backed startup. I'm one person who ships software. Friends? is built on a single DigitalOcean droplet I pay for myself. The whole codebase — matching runtime, personality engine, AI companion, E2EE stack, events pipeline, Stripe billing — is mine.

Adult loneliness in the US is now a measurable public-health emergency (see the research page). At the same time, every consumer social tool optimizes for something other than real friendship — swipes, ad impressions, dwell time, follower counts. None of these metrics correlate with the thing people actually need, which is three-to-five real friends they see regularly.

I don't think this problem is technologically hard. I think it's a mis-aligned-incentives problem. So Friends? starts from the right metric — off-platform meetings per active user per week — and designs everything backwards from that.

• Matching — IPIP-NEO-120 scoring, facet-vector ranking, proximity + interest + personality composite, auto-refill on empty decks.
• Friend? AI — Cerebras qwen-3-235b primary, Groq llama-3.3-70b fallback, Anthropic Claude safety net. Plans hangs, drafts conversation starters, answers questions about how matches work.
• E2EE DMs — custom crypto layer (XChaCha20-Poly1305 + X25519 sealed boxes + Argon2id). Wrapped private keys never leave the browser.
• Live events — Ticketmaster, OpenStreetMap, Reddit, Yelp, Nager.Date public holidays, NewsAPI.ai, NewsData.io. Refreshed every 15 minutes via systemd. Proximity-filtered, weather-annotated.
• Real Stripe billing — four tiers (Free / $7.99 / $14.99 / $29.99-capped-at-1,000). Entitlements system with 20+ quantitative and qualitative features.
• PWA — installable on iOS/Android/desktop, web push notifications, service worker offline shell.

We're doing a Wefunder Community Round on a SAFE at a $5M cap. The money goes to: the first engineering hire, a designer, and a Phoenix-first community lead — plus the AI inference bill as we scale past 10k members. The round is open; you can back Friends? directly and become a member-investor.

The long plan: city-by-city playbook starting in Phoenix, proving that the off-platform-meetup metric is achievable and sustainable at each city's scale. Then slowly expand.

If you have something to say about friendship research, personality psychometrics, E2EE design, or the product itself — the address is yourfriend@arewefriends.org. If you're a press outlet or an investor, same address.