A Threat Tape LLC venture · HumanGrove
HumanGrove
The anti-everything-app: verified humans, self-governing communities, moderation on the record.
Social platforms rot because the business model rewards it — selling attention forces surveillance to target the ads and outrage to maximize the attention. HumanGrove fixes the structure instead of the symptoms: one provably-real human per account, small communities that govern themselves, moderation kept on a tamper-evident public record anyone can recompute, and a feed the user actually owns. It is a trust-and-safety platform wearing a social UI — Threat Tape's home turf.
Six proofs, one demo
- 🧍 One number, one account — second signup denied
- ⬇️ One-tap import of your own posts, no file step
- 🔎 Search: communities first, in-room content hidden
- 🧱 Post in a room vs the square — the membrane holds
- 🚫 Block, and the alt can't respawn around it
- 🧾 A mod removes a post — then tamper, and /verify breaks
What HumanGrove Proves
One Human, One Account
A phone turnstile verifies a real person, but only a salted HMAC of the number is ever stored — never the number itself. The durable identity is a portable, pseudonymous token, so bans and reputation bind to the person, not a recycled SIM. A second signup on the same number is refused, and a blocked user cannot respawn a clean alt.
The Community Is the Atom
Self-governing rooms with real roles, not one global outrage feed. The public/private membrane holds at the query layer: in-room posts never enter the global index or reach non-members, while the public square stays searchable. The room Discord never built, kept intact.
Moderation on the Record
Every consequential mod action is an append-only, hash-chained entry. A public
/verify endpoint recomputes the whole chain; alter one stored record and it reports
the exact sequence where the chain breaks. A per-community audit log shows the cited rule and
rationale with victim PII redacted. This is the differentiator a regulator or court cares about.
You Own the Feed
Chronological by default — no engagement ranker, no slot machine. Block is mutual severance, applied both directions across feed, search, and threads. Mute is a quiet, one-directional filter. Because alts are hard to mint, a block actually bites.
Bring Your Own Content
One-tap OAuth import of your own posts (the live headline), plus a guided archive uploader that parses real platform exports into one normalized schema. Every path is user-authorized retrieval of your own data — never scraping, never driving a logged-in session. That clean legal posture is the whole pitch.
Privacy-Preserving Cold Start
The same phone-hash primitive that resists Sybils doubles as the growth loop: contact matching surfaces "N of your contacts are already here" without ever exposing a raw number and without contacting anyone automatically. Invites are single-shot, with a transparent preview of exactly who will be reached.
Why It Matters
💸 Fix the money
The rot isn't bad moderation — it's the ad model. Subscriptions and community dues instead of behavioral advertising remove the incentive to surveil and enrage. Fix the money and the structure, and most of the rot never grows.
🛡️ Defensible trust & safety
The tamper-evident governance ledger is the one piece no incumbent has and the one an advertiser, regulator, or court would actually care about — auditable removals, appeals, and mod rotation. It reuses Threat Tape's Defensible Governance Record pattern directly.
📦 Portability as the wedge
Data-portability law (EU DMA, GDPR Article 20) is forcing the gatekeepers to build the very export tools our importer consumes. The pitch is "portability plus contact-graph stitching," not "we scrape the incumbents" — the clean side of the line.
How It's Built
The stack
- Python + FastAPI, Postgres for data and the ledger
- App-level SHA-256 hash chain + a
/verifyendpoint - HMAC-peppered phone hash; DID-style portable token
- Postgres full-text search, communities ranked first
- Responsive Next.js / React web client
Nothing here is throwaway
The demo builds the hard, differentiating parts for real — identity, the ledger, the membrane — and stubs only what is "just engineering and money": federation, payments, native mobile, and a staffed trust-and-safety org. Every stub has an obvious production story, and that mapped road is itself part of the pitch.
See the block bite and the ledger break — live.
A clickable demo runs in your browser right now, built on the real production spine. Sign in with any listed number and the verification code shown on screen, then walk the five-minute script: sign up, import, search, post, block, and tamper with the moderation ledger to watch it break.