A Letter From the Founder

February 2026

I want to tell you about the moment I knew something had to change.

I was scrolling through my feed, not looking for anything in particular, just filling time. And I realized I hadn't seen a post from someone I actually care about in twenty minutes. Instead, I'd watched three ads, read two rage-bait articles, and been shown a dozen sponsored posts from brands I'd never heard of. They were targeting me because I'd searched for running shoes in a browser two weeks ago.

That's not connection. That's surveillance dressed up as a social experience.

I think about the photos, often. Every picture I'd ever shared of the people I love. My family. My animals. My life. All of it sitting on a server somewhere, feeding an algorithm, being used to train AI models, making money for companies that never once asked my permission.

I didn't sign up for that. Neither did you.

The reason is simpler than you'd think, and it comes down to money. When advertisers are the customer, you are the product. Every decision about what you see, when you see it, how long you stay, what makes you angry, what makes you click: all of it is optimized for one thing. Selling your attention to the highest bidder.

The algorithm doesn't show you your best friend's new baby. It shows you whatever keeps you scrolling. Turns out, outrage keeps you scrolling longer than joy. Fear keeps you scrolling longer than peace. Loneliness keeps you scrolling longer than belonging.

Social media was supposed to connect us in new ways and bring us closer together. Instead, it figured out that keeping us anxious and addicted and scrolling is more profitable.

So we built something different.

Trellis is a social platform where you are the customer. Not advertisers. Not data brokers. Not AI companies. You. You pay five dollars a month, and in exchange, we work for you. That's it. That's the entire business model.

There is no algorithm. Your feed is chronological. Posts from the people and groups you chose to follow, in the order they were posted. No one decides what you see except you. Want to discover new groups and creators? We built a separate Discovery section around the interests you tell us about. Look at it often, never look at it, update your interests anytime. It's there when you want it and invisible when you don't. Your feed is yours.

There are no ads. Not now. Not ever. Not even tasteful ones. Not even from local businesses. The moment we take a dollar from an advertiser, our incentives split. We will never let that happen.

Your photos have the strongest protection of any social platform. Screenshots produce a black image on iOS and Android. AI scraping is actively blocked. Every image is invisibly watermarked, unique to the viewer, so if a photo ever surfaces somewhere it shouldn't, we can trace exactly who leaked it and put that evidence in your hands. We strip location data from every upload automatically. And we will never, under any circumstances, use photos of your children, your family, or your life to train an AI model. That is not a policy. It is a technical decision baked into the architecture.

Your data stays yours. We don't sell it. We don't share it. We don't analyze it for behavioral patterns. Your private journal is cryptographically encrypted. No one at Trellis can read it, even with full access to our own servers. Your thoughts are yours alone.

Your family belongs here too.

Up to five people can share a Family Plan. What's considered a family you ask? Whatever you decide! Each person gets their own full account with their own profile, their own feed, their own encrypted journal. But you also get something else: a private Family Group that is completely invisible to the outside world. Not indexed by search engines. Not scraped by AI. Not visible to anyone who isn't in your family.

Inside that space, you build the things that matter. Shared photo albums where every picture is protected. A Family Cookbook where grandma's recipes live forever, with her handwriting in the photos and the story of why she made it every Thanksgiving. A shared calendar. Milestone reminders for birthdays and anniversaries. A place to collect and protect the traditions that make your family yours.

Kids 13 and older can have their own accounts on the Family Plan with full parental controls. You decide what they can see, who they can message, and when notifications go quiet for the night. When they turn 18, you'll be prompted to hand control over to them. Their account, their rules. Until then, yours.

And when your family grows, you can merge Family Groups together with a Hearth Code. Your parents' family group joins yours. Your sister's joins too. Grandparents see the grandkids' photos. Cousins stay connected across state lines. Everyone keeps their own account, their own privacy, their own space. But the family is together in one place, building something that lasts longer than any social media post.

We built this because family photos and recipes and traditions deserve better than a platform that uses them to train AI models. They deserve a home.

What does it actually feel like?

Imagine your neighborhood has a front porch. You sit down, and the people you actually know are there. Your neighbor shares a photo of their new garden. Someone asks for a mechanic recommendation and gets twelve genuine answers. A friend posts that they're having a hard week, and people respond with kindness instead of performative emoji.

You scroll for a few minutes. You see everything your people have posted. A little green message tells you: you're all caught up. And you put your phone down and go live your life.

That's Trellis. No infinite scroll. No engagement tricks. No dopamine manipulation. Just the people you care about, sharing the things that matter to them, in a place that respects your time and your attention.

If you create, this is your platform.

Trellis was built for creators who are tired of being exploited by the platforms they built their audiences on.

When your audience subscribes to support you on Trellis, you keep 95% of every dollar they pay. Not 70%. Not 88%. Ninety-five percent. We take 5% to keep the lights on and we will never change that number. We have no investors demanding higher margins. We have subscribers.

When you're ready to publish, Trellis gives you that too. Through Editions, you can sell your work directly to your audience. Digital or physical. Books, essays, photography collections, zines, anything you create. You keep 90%. Compare that to the 35–70% that traditional digital publishers take from your work. No gatekeeper. No submission process. No algorithm deciding whether your audience gets to see what you made. You publish, they read, you get paid. Want to offer a limited run of signed copies to your most dedicated supporters? We can do that.

You can also form Creator Collectives. Up to five creators sharing a subscriber base, publishing together, splitting revenue however you agree. Start a writing collective. Launch an anthology with four other poets. Build a local journalism partnership. We built this because creators do their best work together, and the economics should make collaboration easy, not impossible.

Your audience belongs to you. We will never throttle your reach to sell you visibility. We will never change the economics to fund our growth at your expense. The deal we make with you on day one is the deal that stands.

Why this matters.

I believe community is the thing most of us are missing and most of us are looking for. Not followers. Not engagement. Not content. Community. The kind where someone knows your name and remembers that your kid had a soccer game last weekend and asks how it went.

Social media promised us that and delivered the opposite. It gave us an audience when we wanted a neighborhood. It gave us metrics when we wanted connection. It gave us an addiction when we wanted a place to belong.

Trellis is an attempt to get it right. A place designed for the way humans actually want to connect: in small groups, around shared interests, within the places they live. Not performing for strangers. Not competing for likes. Just being people, together.

Come sit on the porch.

We're launching with 500 founding members. If you're one of them, your price locks at $3.99 a month for life. Not because it's a gimmick. Because you believed in this before anyone else did, and we want to honor that.

We know we're small. We know the platforms we're up against have billions of dollars and billions of users. We're not trying to replace them overnight. But every person who joins is a person who said: I want something better. And enough people saying that, quietly, in enough cities, in enough neighborhoods, that changes things.

A trellis doesn't grow on its own. It just gives the vine something to hold onto. The people, the conversations, the recipes and photos and inside jokes: that's the vine. We just built the structure. You do the growing.

You don't have to delete anything to try this. You don't have to make a declaration or burn a bridge. Just come sit on the porch. See how it feels to use a social platform that doesn't want anything from you except the chance to earn your trust every single month.

I think you'll stay.

With gratitude,

Matt

Founder, Trellis

trellissocial.com

P.S. Oh, we also invented a sarcasm font. You're welcome⸮