The village around your baby, in one place

The names people actually go by

Your father-in-law is not "Robert Whitfield" to this child; he is Poppy. Every villager writes their own profile — the name they want to be called, how they are related, where they are, a line about themselves and a wish for the baby. Parents can assign nicknames and honorary titles too, for the ones who will never get round to it.

In eighteen years, when your child reads this, the directory is the part that will stop them: a room full of people who were already there before they arrived, in their own words.

Recognised without a password

Nobody in your village is going to maintain a password for your baby registry. So they do not have one. A villager types their email once and gets a link; tapping it on their phone means that device knows them from then on — one-tap likes, comments already signed, their name on the memories they add.

That link expires, and it is single-use. It is also the reason for the honest limitation below.

One room, and why there are no private messages

The village chat is one room your whole village shares. Replies, a pinned message for the thing everyone keeps asking, and parent moderation — hide, unhide, pin or delete anything.

There are deliberately no direct messages. Identity here is a link on a device, not a password, and a family tablet gets passed around. A "private" thread under that model is only as private as whoever is holding the phone, and we would rather not offer a guarantee the design cannot keep. The room says so plainly, on the page, above the box you type in.

Two families, one registry — without pretending it is encrypted

A baby has two sides of a family, and they do not always want the same conversation. Switch on family circles and you name the families in your village — "Mum's side", "the in-laws", "college friends" — put people in them, and anyone posting ticks who it is for. Any number at once: a grandmother writing to both sides writes once. Each circle also gets its own page of the guestbook, so you can read one family's notes on their own.

Here is the exact strength, which is also what the app tells your guests before they post: a circle is visible only to the people you put in it, and only once they have opened their own emailed link — so forwarding your registry link to a stranger lets them in to nothing. It is not a password. It is as private as those people's inboxes and phones, and you, the parents, can read every circle, because it is your registry.

That is a real boundary, which is why we will build it and still will not build direct messages: a circle has a roster you named and can audit, and every member holds an identity we actually verified. A DM has neither.

When two people would rather not see each other at all

Divorce, a fallout, a relative everyone is tiptoeing around — it is a baby shower, so it comes up. Circles on their own stop each side reading the other's notes, and both sides still see each other's names and photographs in the village list every time they open the page, which is usually the thing they were trying to avoid.

So there is a second switch, "keep my circles apart", and it is deliberately separate: most families use circles for convenience and would find a split village baffling. Turn it on and somebody in a circle sees only the people who share a circle with them, plus anyone you have not put in a circle at all — the friends and neighbours who belong to everybody.

What it separates: the village list, the guestbook and the chat. What it leaves alone: the registry, the shower page and the predictions, which stay whole because they are about the baby rather than about either side of the family. The memory feed is a third switch of its own — see below. And none of it is ever a secret from you: you still see your whole village and every memory, because it is your registry.

Memories: your call, then theirs

The memory feed is the one part we default to shared and mean it. It is the eighteen-year record — the photos, the milestones, the first steps — and a record that quietly splits into halves is not a record. So out of the box every memory goes to your whole village, on every registry, whatever else you have switched on.

If that is wrong for your family, you can change it, and then the choice moves to whoever is posting: they get the same tick-boxes as the guestbook, and anything they leave alone still goes to everyone. Two controls in that order — you decide what is possible, they decide what happens.

A memory sent to one circle only appears in that circle's feed, and its comments and hearts go with it, so a grandmother never sees replies from people who never saw the photo. You still see all of it, and all of it is in your export. It is your vault.

A guestbook, like the one on the table at the shower

Open the guestbook and anyone holding your link can sign it — a line, a blessing, a piece of advice — with no account and nothing to install. It reads oldest first, like pages of a book, and you can pin the ones you want at the front and hide anything you would rather not keep.

It is off until you switch it on, because a guestbook nobody asked for is just a page that says "nobody has signed yet" for nine months. With circles on, a note can be addressed to one family or to everybody.

Badges that mean something

Villagers earn badges from what they actually did: gifts claimed, money given to a fund, memories contributed, a prediction made. Nothing is awarded for logging in. The Hall of Angels on the registry front page ranks the people who have helped most — unless they asked to give anonymously, in which case they stay off it entirely.

Questions

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