The honeymoon with social media has ended. There’s nothing in it for people who have anything to lose.*

Almost everyone has something to lose. Careless tweets have cost people their jobs and crashed their careers. Women who speak out on the Internet complain that they are stalked and threatened.

Social media has allowed us to stay connected to our friends and family. The cost is that intimate details of our lives are exposed to billions of people on the Internet. On some social networks, even if you try to control your privacy settings, details of your life may leak out via “friends-of-friends”.

nderground is a social network built for privacy. We built nderground for parents, lovers, jobseekers, licensed professionals, people who are not “out” to everyone in their lives. We built nderground for you.

We built nderground to allow people to share the events of their lives with their friends and family without sharing with the entire Internet. No privacy settings are needed on nderground because nderground is private. What is posted on nderground stays on nderground.

nderground has no “true name” requirement. Many nderground users go by a handle (a made up name), rather than their legal name.

An nderground member is known only to their connections. On nderground these connections are called a Karass (a reference inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle).

Content that is posted on nderground can only be seen by a member’s Karass. Relationships among Karass members are one-to-one. For example, if Alice has added Bob and Theresa to her Karass, she can see their posts. But Bob cannot see Theresa’s posts and Theresa cannot see Bob's posts unless they are in each other’s Karass. Their association with Alice does not make them visible to each other.

The core of nderground is the nderground board, which allows you to share your writing and pictures with your Karass (Karass members are notified by email about posts and comments). nderground also includes a profile page where you can post as much or as little information as you like.

Many features, large and small are coming. We are working on a gallery that will allow you to manage the pictures you post to nderground. Some people may prefer to post in the Gallery rather than on their board.

We are considering many other features, including public spaces where the nderground community can post text, pictures and music.

If nderground sounds like the kind of social network that you have been looking for, you can request an invitation at http://www.nderground.net (there is a “request and nderground invitation” link at the bottom of the page).

We look forward to hearing from you. We want to hear about any problems you encounter and how you think that nderground can be improved. You can reach us at [email protected]. We are also on Twitter (@nderground_net).

The Notes from the nderground publication on Medium has posts about nderground, building scalable web applications and what constitutes a Minimum Viable Product.

*Social Media is Dead to Donald Glover, Action Bronson and Iggy Azalea by Paul Cantor, Medium, Feb 25, 2015

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