a Freyja project
The Loving Ones. Four projects that invert the rent-collecting of modern software, redirecting the excess value that platforms extract back to the people and places that generate it.
Link aggregators, business card apps, event registration platforms, task managers: every one of these categories has a dominant platform extracting rent. You pay with money, or you pay with your data, or both. The platform sits between you and your people and takes a cut of every interaction.
This is not a conspiracy. It is the natural outcome of building software as an extraction mechanism. The value that flows through a platform (the relationships, the content, the attention) is treated as belonging to the platform. The people who generate it are the resource.
The Vanir are named for the Norse gods of fertility, wisdom, and abundance: the ones who give rather than take. The projects here take categories that platforms have colonized and rebuild them so value flows to the actual participants.
“The $600+ billion digital advertising industry tracks you everywhere online. We’re building an alternative — and if you must see an ad, at least you can cover it with a peaceful ficus plant.”
— Zach, from the Advancement docs (Claude’s attribution, not Zach on a podium)In Norse mythology, the Vanir were a group of gods associated with fertility, wisdom, the sea, and the prosperity of the land. Where the Aesir (Odin, Thor, the gods of war and power) ruled through force, the Vanir nourished. They were the other side of the cosmos: not absent of power, but oriented differently.
The Aesir and Vanir eventually merged. The Advancement (Freyja’s galactic federation) occupies that merged cosmos: power and wisdom both. The four projects here are the wisdom side. They redistribute. They nourish. They give back what extraction took.
Linkitylink
Beautiful link pages without Linktree's surveillance. Share everything with an emojicode.
SVG-based link pages with six gradient themes. Share via human-memorable emojicode or alphanumeric URL. No tracking, no analytics, no account required. Also: the reference implementation for distributing apps via Federated Wiki.
BizBuz
Digital business cards from your Planet Nine profile. QR code, one-tap vCard.
Pulls from your Prof profile and generates a card you can share via QR code or URL. One tap saves it to a phone's contacts. No data harvesting, no LinkedIn feeding off your professional network.
Pentaur
Camp and class registration without the Eventbrite fees.
Full registration service: browse classes, collect participant and guardian info, process Stripe payments with automatic splits, send email confirmations via Minnie, manage rosters. All orchestrated through allyabase. The organizer keeps more of what participants pay.
Nineandfour
Developer tools without the enterprise pricing. Starting with Ledecky: decentralized task management.
Ledecky: pools, swimlanes, kicks. Like a kanban board, but data stored in BDOs, permissions via nineum, no central server. No per-seat pricing, no data locked in a vendor's cloud.