Finally sent the overhang route after six weeks of failing on the same move. Turns out the trick was a completely different foot placement that Sam spotted from the ground.
Share with the people
you actually meant
Circles is a social network made of small groups. Every post goes to one circle, chosen by you, and stays there. Nothing is recommended to strangers and nothing is ranked.
Everything, in the order it happened
No ranking, no suggested posts, no accounts you did not choose. When you reach the end, it says so and stops.
Boiler engineer is coming Thursday between 08:00 and 12:00. I can be here until 10 — can someone cover the rest of the window?
Next month — the long Russian one everybody keeps recommending, or the short essay collection? I am genuinely happy either way but we should decide before the 20th.
Reminder that the gym closes early on Sunday for a competition. Moving our session to Saturday morning unless anyone objects in the next day or so.
Grandma's ninetieth. She made everyone dance, including the people who claimed they do not dance. Full album in the circle.
A circle for each part of your life
Most people run four or five. They do not overlap, and nobody outside a circle can see that it exists.
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Private
Sunday Climbers
Six of us, one gym, a shared spreadsheet of routes nobody else would find interesting.
6 members Active today -
Private
Flat 3B
Bills, boiler, bins and the ongoing negotiation about the thermostat.
4 members Active today -
Invite only
Book Club
Twelve people, one book a month, and a strict rule against finishing early and spoiling it.
12 members Active this week -
Private
Extended Family
Four generations, three countries, and a lot of photographs of small children.
31 members Active today -
Invite only
Allotment Plot 14
Seed swaps, slug warfare and a running total of what the tomatoes actually cost us.
8 members Active this week -
Private
Old Course Mates
Fifteen years on, still the same arguments about the same lecturer.
17 members Active this month
Real connections, not a follower count
You will never see how many people someone knows. There is no number to compete on.
- LM
Léa Moreau
@lea
Climbs badly, photographs it well. Shares route beta and very little else.
- Sunday Climbers
- Book Club
In 2 circles with you
- IB
Idris Bello
@idris
Keeper of the flat spreadsheet and the only person who reads the meter.
- Flat 3B
In 1 circle with you
- HP
Hana Petrova
@hana
Reads faster than the club can keep up with and never spoils anything.
- Book Club
- Allotment Plot 14
In 2 circles with you
- NH
Nour Haddad
@nour
Family archivist. Three decades of photographs, slowly being scanned.
- Extended Family
In 1 circle with you
The settings other networks bury
These are the defaults, not the options. Every one of them ships switched to the private side.
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Posts default to one circle
Choosing a circle is a required step, not a dropdown you can leave on public. There is no public option at all.
On by default
-
No cross-circle visibility
Someone in your Book Club cannot see that your Flat 3B circle exists, or who is in it.
On by default
-
Screenshots are not blocked, they are logged
Blocking is theatre. Instead, the circle sees when a post was screenshotted, which is a social fix for a social problem.
On by default
-
Search engine indexing
Nothing on Circles is crawlable. There is no public page to index in the first place.
Permanently off
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Read receipts
Off unless a circle turns them on together. One person cannot enable them for everybody.
Off by default
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Export everything, any time
One click produces a zip of every post, photo and comment you have made. Median export completes in 31 seconds.
Always available
We cannot show you targeted advertising because we do not collect what would be needed to target it. There is no advertising business here to protect, which is why these defaults can stay where they are.
You are the customer, so there is a price
Circles is small on purpose. A subscription is the only thing keeping it that way.
Free
Up to three circles, everything else included.
Billed monthly Billed annually ($0/year)
- Up to 3 circles
- Unlimited posts and photos
- Full privacy controls
- Unlimited circles
- Original-quality photo storage
Member
Unlimited circles and full-resolution photo storage.
Billed monthly Billed annually ($600/year)
- Everything in Free
- Unlimited circles
- Original-quality photo storage
- Shared circle albums
- Priority export
Family
One subscription covering up to six people.
Billed monthly Billed annually ($1440/year)
- Everything in Member, for 6 people
- Shared family archive
- Legacy contact settings
- Guided setup for older relatives
- One combined invoice
Smaller turned out to be the feature
Nobody asks for a smaller social network until they have used one.
“I post photographs of my children again. Not to an audience of four hundred, to the eleven people who are actually related to them.”
“The feed ends. It genuinely ends, and then it says so. I had forgotten that was possible.”
“Our flat's boiler saga lives in a circle of four rather than in a group chat that also contains my mother.”
The things people check first
Mostly about what we do not do.
No. There is no public surface anywhere on Circles, which is why nothing here is indexable and why we can promise that a post reaches exactly the people you chose.
Subscriptions, and nothing else. Free accounts are capped at three circles, which is enough for most people and is subsidised by members who need more.
They stay, at the resolution they were uploaded. Dropping to Free limits you to three circles but never deletes anything, and export remains available.
Only chronological ordering. There is no ranking model, no recommendation system and no way for a post to reach someone who is not in the circle it was posted to.
Yes, in one click, at any time, on every plan including Free. The export is a documented format rather than a dump nobody can read.
Start with one circle
Most people begin with the group chat they wish had somewhere better to live.