antesoc.

A movement for real connection

Be social. Not social media.

Your life is not a feed. Your friends are not followers. Your time belongs to you.

Ante up

Why "ante"?

In poker, everyone puts a chip in before the cards are dealt. Nobody plays alone, and the game doesn't start until everyone is in.

Logging off by yourself doesn't work. If you put your phone down and your friends don't, you're the one who misses the joke, the plan, the group chat. That isn't a willpower problem. It's a group problem, and it needs a group fix.

So an AnteSoc pact doesn't count until your whole crew is in, and nobody has to take the hit alone.

And nobody gets dragged in, either. If someone doesn't want to, the rest of you can go with who's in. Open seats never have names on them, so nobody gets called out for sitting out, and the door stays open if they change their mind.

How it works

  1. Deal a pact

    Whoever starts it is the dealer. Pick how many of you are in it, then put your first name down as the first chip.

  2. Pass the link

    Drop it in the group chat. Each friend adds their chip and sends the new link back.

  3. Last chip in, it's on

    When the final friend signs, the pact counts for everyone. Then go do something together.

The pact

Five promises, made to each other, not to an app.

Nothing here keeps score. The best outcome is that you close this tab and never need it again.

What we stand for

Connection over consumption

Technology should help people form relationships, not monopolize their attention.

Presence over popularity

Real friendship matters more than follower counts, likes, and public validation.

Choice over compulsion

You should get to set your own limits, and the platforms should have to respect them.

We built the opposite of a feed.

  • accounts
  • streaks
  • feed
  • followers
  • likes
  • tracking
  • notifications

This site never sees your names.

There are no accounts, no analytics and no third-party scripts here. Your pact lives in the link itself, in the part after the #, and browsers don't send that part to our server. So we never see your names.

That keeps the pact off our server. It doesn't make the link a secret. Anyone you send it to can read it, and so can anyone who sees a screenshot, anyone with your phone, and any browser extension you've installed.

So use first names or initials, since a pact doesn't need anything more.

For organizations

If you run a phone-free school, a youth group, a team or a parent circle, you can put the pact on your own site.

It's one file. No account, no API key, and the plugin itself collects nothing from your people.

Put it on a page without analytics or session-recording scripts. Anything running on your page can read the pact link and the names on screen, and the plugin can't stop that.

Host it yourself and your visitors never touch antesoc.com at all. The file makes no network requests of its own.

If you'd rather load it from us, use the pinned version with its integrity hash. The browser refuses to run the file if a single byte of it changes, so nobody can swap in different code.

Swap in your own promises with <li> lines, or leave them out to use the AnteSoc pact as written.

Download antesoc.js v1.2.0 · 18 KB · one file, no dependencies · MIT licensed

Host it yourself (recommended)

<script type="module" src="/js/antesoc.js"></script>

<ante-pledge need="5" host="Lincoln High">
  <li>No phones at lunch.</li>
  <li>One in-person plan every weekend.</li>
</ante-pledge>

Or load it from antesoc.com, pinned

<script type="module"
  src="https://antesoc.com/v1.2.0/antesoc.js"
  integrity="sha384-aDroEPJOSBIGBAcXY1bTbQcGOWLJH+EbC+ItFhko2q1lis5u7ivzIF4+vKSd2ECL"
  crossorigin="anonymous"></script>