Circles and Communities, Not Friends and Followers

Kowloon is a social network made up of smaller independent interconnected communities that are part of the global network but also function as their own “walled cities,” like the legendary Hong Kong enclave from which Kowloon takes its name. And instead of “friends” and “followers,” and an “algorithm” that decides what you see, Kowloon has Circles.

Find a Kowloon community full of your friends or people with shared interests, and you can make any post public or community-only. Create a “Friends” Circle and a “Family” Circle and share pics of your kids to Family and dirty jokes to Friends. No one else can see these posts but the people you choose, and no one knows which Circle you've put them in… so nobody's feelings will get hurt if they're in your “Friends” Circle but not your “BFFs” Circle.

Create a “News” Circle full of people and communities you trust to keep you up to date on current events and filter your timeline to only show Article posts from News Circle members while you're on the train headed to work; create a “Fashionistas” Circle and show Media posts to see the latest styles and trends. Choose Event posts from your “Favorite Musicians” Circle to figure out where you're gonna be next Saturday night.

And you can share your Circles for other people to see and copy and find new and interesting people and communities to follow. In Kowloon, you are the algorithm.

Freedom Of Speech, Freedom From Speech

Because Kowloon isn't a corporate-owned network but a federation of individual communities, no one but your community's admin can tell you what you can and can't say and post. No political or artistic censorship, no having to hide certain w**ds from an automated censor, no mysterious “jail” sentences or bans.

But while we believe in freedom of speech, we also believe in freedom from speech. You can block not only individual users in Kowloon, but entire communities — you won't see anything from any member of that community. You have total control over not only who sees your post — the public, or only your community, or only people in one of your Circles — but who can reply or even react — so no creepy random people hearting all of your selfies in a row. You can even turn replies and reacts off entirely if you want to deliver a monologue rather than engage in a dialogue or open forum.

The Social Swiss Army Knife

Kowloon allows you to create Groups in your community which can be open to the public or only fellow community members. You can also create Bookmarks that are links to anything available online, and share them with the world, your community, or keep them to yourself.

And because all public posts in Kowloon appear on your community's public feed and on its Web frontend, and community admins can create WordPress-style static pages as well as posts, you can very easily use Kowloon as a publishing platform for one person or an entire organization. Kowloon is as useful for a single blogger wanting an easy-to-use platform as it is for a news publication or a nonprofit or real-world community to have a safe space so its members not only communicate with each other but publish to the world at large.

Free As In Speech, Free As In Beer

Kowloon is entirely open source and built with the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js), and it costs nothing — you can run the install script on your server and have a running Kowloon community server in five minutes!

There are also mobile apps for iOS/Android that will be in the App Store and Play Store soon, which are also open source. Our future development roadmap also includes Mastodon/Fediverse integration and a plugin architecture to allow anyone to extend Kowloon.

Current Status

Kowloon is currently in semi-private alpha — you can download and use the server software and the docs are on this site, but we're still testing the iOS and Android apps. But you can sign up for the waitlist to get notified when Kowloon goes into open beta!