the quintal is open

A confession before the announcement: I spent years saying I would never build social software. Every time the idea came up I pictured the whole package - ranked feeds, follower counts, the engagement machinery knocking at the door - and recoiled. Then one day I paid attention to what I actually missed about the internet, and it was none of that package. It was the other part, the one that existed before it: guestbooks, “who I read” lists, stumbling onto someone’s weird little site at 2am.

So I built exactly that. It is called quintal - Portuguese for “backyard”, always lowercase - and it is live, in alpha: quintal.blog.br.

“isso aqui é o meu lugar na internet, e essas são as pessoas que eu escolhi dividir ele comigo.”

(“this here is my place on the internet, and these are the people I chose to share it with.”)

That sentence lives in the project’s README, and it is the most honest summary I can give. quintal is not a social network, even if it looks like one at first glance. It is a neighborhood: each person has their corner, writes their pieces, receives guestbook notes and chooses who to read. Public by default, yours by principle. Home as a verb, not a noun: a place you keep, tidy, share and welcome visitors into.

The vocabulary of the place

quintal has its own words, because naming things with affection is part of the project. The interface is Brazilian Portuguese first, so the words travel untranslated:

• canto (“corner”) - your personal home: profile, prosas, recados, links;
• prosa - the unit of writing, from a two-line note to a long essay;
• recado - an entry in a canto’s guestbook;
• depoimento - a public testimony about a person, visible only after they accept it;
• cumadi - a canto you read and recommend, the “who I read” of quintal;
• passear (“to wander”) - serendipitous discovery, one canto at a time, guided by the mascot;
• visitas - quiet notifications: who stopped by your canto since your last visit.

If you are Brazilian, two of those words just gave you déjà vu. Recado and depoimento come straight from Orkut - the social network that raised a generation of us - on purpose: it was the last big place on the internet where kindness had its own vocabulary. The difference here is that a depoimento is a love letter with delivery control: the recipient decides whether to open the envelope in the living room.

And the mascot? Meet axô, a pink axolotl:

Axolotls regenerate entire body parts, and here your data does too - but that is the next section.

Your data lives on your PDS

The technical decision that holds up all the others: quintal runs on atproto, the open protocol underneath Bluesky. And it is an appview, not a host. Meaning: quintal does not keep your writing. Every prosa, every recado, every setting of your canto is a record in your own repository, on your own PDS (personal data server). quintal indexes those records so it can find them fast and renders the interface on top, and writes back to your repo through OAuth - never asking for your password, with credentials scoped to the place.quintal.* collections only. Your other records, like your Bluesky ones, it never touches.

The consequences are the best part. Want to leave? Take everything: point another appview at the same PDS. Came back? Nothing was lost. quintal could disappear tomorrow (I am one person maintaining an open-source project, not a company) and your words stay yours, ready for any other interface to read, because the lexicons are public. Free exit comes from the protocol, not from a promise of mine.

Hence the axolotl: regrows the limb, regrows the data. The pun axô/achou (“found it”) becomes the mechanic - it is axô who takes you wandering through the neighborhood and introduces you to new cantos.

For the Elixir crowd who reads me for the Elixir posts: quintal is Phoenix + LiveView with SSR, a firehose consumer indexing into Postgres, Oban for jobs, Finch for HTTP, a Nix flake for dev, Fly.io in production, AGPL license. It is also the largest dogfood of proto_rune, my AT Protocol SDK - firehose, OAuth, XRPC, all of it flowing through. Nothing tests an SDK like a real product on top of it asking for features.

The constitution

Some decisions in quintal are not up for negotiation, and I would rather say them out loud:

1. Chronological forever. There is no ranking function and there never will be. Not a missing feature - the constitution.
2. Zero popularity metrics. No follower counts, no likes, no public numbers of anything. If you write well, no number says so - people show up, leave a recado and come back. Feedback here has a body and a name.
3. Human writing. A signed pledge, a badge - not a detector. A manifesto, not policing.
4. Simple and fast above all. Performance is a feature. The reading page is the product.
5. PT-BR first. International by architecture (every string goes through gettext since line 1), Brazilian by soul.

And entry is by invitation. quintal is small on purpose, and I like it that way.

The house rules

There is a whole code of conduct page about this, written in first person on purpose: quintal is my project, shared with friends and loved ones, so the rules say “I” and not “the team”. The part that must not be left implied, I am leaving implied zero: this is a collective, communal space, and transphobia does not fit in it. Not in prosas, not in recados, not in depoimentos, not “just asking questions”. I wrote that part with my heart in my hand because it is about me and about many people I love: quintal exists so that trans, travesti and non-binary people have a common place on the internet where they can simply exist and write.

Moderation, for now, is one person (me): every report is read slowly, by a human, no bots, no auto-replies. And even when a recado is hidden from a canto, the writer’s record stays intact on their own PDS - words belong to whoever wrote them, always.

Alpha, so what?

Honest status: MVP in alpha. Things change, break and change again. There are plenty of messy corners, plenty of ugly buttons, and an idea list longer than my free-hours list. The code is open (github.com/zoedsoupe/quintal), the protocol rules are public, and the people already living there help take care of it.

If you have an atproto handle (a Bluesky one works), you can sign in with it once your invite arrives - or ping me, because invites are for giving. Meanwhile, the guestbook is open and axô loves company for a wander.

The algorithm will not show you this post. But look at that: axô found it.