Overview

Homestead answers one question: “What are my people up to?” It collects the people you care about from many apps into one feed, shows what it can, ends when you are caught up, and is honest about the rest.

What you do with it

1. Add people. Paste a profile link, a share-sheet message from Douyin or Xiaohongshu, an @handle, or a whole list. Homestead works out the platform and who it is. One person can have several accounts, so Mom’s Instagram and Facebook live under “Mom”.
2. Read one feed. Stories and posts from everyone, ranked by how recent they are and how close you are to the person. The story rail at the top shows faces. When you’ve seen everything, the feed says “You’re all caught up”.
3. Visit the rest. Some apps keep posts inside the app (WeChat Moments, personal LINE). Homestead can’t see those, so it suggests a visit with a hearth pick: “It’s been a while since you visited Grandma Noi. Say hi on LINE?” One tap opens the app.
4. Share with the household. Family members log in to the same Homestead with their own accounts. Each person keeps their own seen state. Circles group people (“Family”, “Thai cooking”) and can be shared as a link or QR code.

How Homestead gets posts

Each platform has a fetch tier:

Tier	Who fetches	Platforms
server	Homestead itself, through public APIs	Bluesky, Truth Social (best effort), X with your own API key
agent	Your AI agent, in its own logged-in browser	Instagram, Facebook, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, X without a key, LINE VOOM
closed	Nobody	WeChat, personal LINE

Homestead never stores your passwords or cookies for these platforms. Read Platforms and fetch tiers for the details.

The pieces

• The server. One Go binary. It serves the web app at /, the REST API at /api/v1, the MCP endpoint at /mcp, signed media at /media, and public share pages at /s/…. Data lives in one folder (/data in Docker): homestead.db, media/ and secret.key.
• The web app. Works in any modern browser and installs as a PWA. On Android Chrome, “Share to Homestead” sends shared text straight to the add screen.
• The phone app. Flutter, for iOS 15+ and Android 8+. Connecting, signing in, pairing by QR and finding the server on your Wi-Fi are on main. The feed, stories, people and settings screens are not yet. Coming in 1.0 (M-03)
• AI agents. Hermes, OpenClaw or any MCP client, connected with a scoped token. See Agents.
• The Firefox companion. An extension and a small helper program that save posts from profiles you visit. See The companion. Available on main (S-16)

What it won’t do

• It doesn’t post, like or reply. Replies always open the source app.
• It doesn’t send push notifications in this version.
• It doesn’t bypass privacy settings, logins or captchas, and it doesn’t fetch anything your own account can’t already see.
• It isn’t a hosted service. Each household runs its own.

Languages

English, Simplified Chinese (家园) and Thai ship together. The Chinese and Thai translations are drafts waiting for native review. Coming in 1.0 (Q-02)

Next steps

• Quick start: build and run it with Docker.
• First run: create your household.