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Introducing Cabin, the open source, privacy-focused social platform.


A preview of Cabin's media upload experience

Well hello there! My name is John Jackson, and I co-founded Cabin because, quite frankly, I’m disgusted with the state of social media. Most major social platforms have a single priority: growing their revenue. And don’t get me wrong, I understand that revenue is important to the success of these platforms, but we’ve ventured far beyond the realm of ethical profit, and well into the land of toxic capitalism.

Platforms earn most of their revenue through ads. This means they’re incentivized to keep users engaged as much as possible to maximize ad views. Some of the real-world consequences of this:

Ads are neverending

It can often feel like you’re sifting through an ocean of ads to find the content your friends are posting. There’s nothing “social” about that.

Manipulative algorithms

Platforms use manipulative algorithms to keep users engaged, often elevating the most controversial content as it draws the highest level of engagement among users.

Push notifications

Most of which are completely senseless—are near constant to keep users coming back into the app. There is nothing authentic about being baited back into an app.

Misinformation

Platforms aren’t doing enough to identify, mark, and educate users on misinformation. But as mentioned earlier, controversial posts result in higher engagement, which means most platforms simply don’t care.

Call me delusional, but I believe a better social platform can exist; one that prioritizes people over profit.

Introducing Cabin, the open source, privacy-focused social platform

Cabin is designed to be everything we loved about MySpace, with a modern twist—Cabin is decentralized and built on AT Protocol. We’re launching Cabin in June 2026 under the AGPL v3.0 open source license.

Cabin’s features

I realize not everyone was alive when MySpace was at its peak, which would probably leave you wondering what can be expected from Cabin. Fear not, as I have come prepared with images.

A preview of Cabin's Post editor

Markdown support, with a thoughtfully-designed editor

We’re making it easy to write (and consume) long-form content by implementing support for markdown. For the less tech savvy folks, markdown is just a lightweight formatting language. You’ll be able to easily embed links, create lists, style text, and plenty more.

A preview of Cabin's polling feature

Polls, for asking the real questions

Whether you’re trying to prove a point to your spouse or figure out vacation locations for the Fram’s next trip, we’ve got you covered. I’m personally most excited for this feature because it will help us gather important feedback from users.

A preview of Cabin's media upload experience

Share images and videos

Share all the beautiful moments you’ve captured. We’ll scrub the metadata on your media to maintain your privacy. Don’t worry, though, you’ll be able to toggle automatic scrubbing.

Launching June 2026

We’re on track to launch Cabin on iOS, Android, and web this summer, and we can’t wait to share more with you all. We appreciate any support you can give, whether by signing up for early access or spreading the word.

How you can help us

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