weblin — A layer on top of the web that makes people visible again

One product, three ways in

Your interests already
brought you here.
Now meet everyone else they brought.

Avatars on every website. Thoughts that stay for seven days. A mobile app that carries it all. Built around the one thing that's always connected humans — the things they care about.

01 · Presence

Avatars on every page.

The other avatars are real people, on the same page as you in this moment. Wave, chat, call — all inside the browser.

02 · Thoughts

A community on every page.

Leave a thought. Read what others left. Vote, reply, favorite the pages that matter. Every post fades after seven days.

03 · Mobile

Take the rooms with you.

A feed of your favorite pages, a share-sheet into any URL, a private inbox. No email, no password — just your avatar, travelling with you.

The idea, in three sentences

The simplest thing we could build.
And also the most obvious.

People have always gathered around what they care about. The web already organized the world that way. We just made one small change.

People are defined by what they care about.

Astronomy. Cooking. A band nobody's heard of. A political cause. A strange corner of maths. The thing about people is — they find each other around the things.

The web is already organized around those interests.

Every topic on Earth has a page. Billions of pages — each one a room full of people who came for the same reason. Articles, products, forums, fan pages, wikis, blogs. The map of human curiosity, already built.

Until now, those rooms were empty.

You read the article. You left. You never saw who else was there. Billions of people, sharing the same interest in the same moment on the same page — invisible to each other. That's the thing we change.

Every page becomes a room. The room fills with the people who came for the same reason you did.

No account. No algorithm. No performance. Just the community that was always going to be there anyway — finally visible.

02 · Thoughts

A community
on every page.

The web finally has a voice — and it isn't AI. Leave a thought on any article. Read what others wrote. Every page becomes a tiny, temporary forum, made by the people who cared enough to show up.

Post without an account. Post without performing.
Vote, reply, favorite pages — your own feed builds itself.
Posts fade after 7 days. No receipts. No baggage.
Chronological. No algorithm fighting for your attention — you came here on purpose.

03 · Everywhere

The room doesn't close
when you close the laptop.

The weblin mobile app brings Thoughts, chats, and your rooms with you. No email. No password. Your avatar travels with a secret ID you control — anonymous by default, yours by design.

Feed — what's new on the pages you favorite, chronologically.
Share sheet — from any app, tap Share → weblin → walk into the room for that URL.
Inbox — replies to your thoughts and private messages, in one place.
Secret ID — no sign-up. Your identity lives on your phone, not ours.

Three iPhones showing the weblin mobile app — Feed, Share sheet, and Inbox

Four promises we made to ourselves

What weblin
will never do.

Four things we decided before we wrote a line of code. Four things that won't change if we get big, or if a VC walks in the door, or if the numbers slow down.

No algorithm.

Chronological only. We do not rank, boost, or reorder what you see. Your attention is not a product we sell.

No ads. No data sold.

Your URLs are hashed on your device before they leave. A patented mechanism. We couldn't sell what you read even if we wanted to.

Open source.

Every line of our code is public on GitHub. No black box, no hidden model, no dark pattern we could hide if we tried.

You can always leave.

Export your presence, your Thoughts, your history — in one click, any time. No dark pattern holds you here. If weblin ever stops serving you, close the tab. Nothing follows you out.

AI made the internet louder.
We're not fighting it.
We're just making a room in the web where it isn't invited.

Why I built this —

I'm writing this from my desk in Hamburg, the day before we go public.

For years I watched the same pattern. Someone reads a great article. Closes the tab. They learned something, maybe felt something — but there's nobody to talk to about it. So they open Instagram. Scroll. Forget.

The strange part is: other people read the same article. At the same time. Probably feeling the same thing. We just couldn't see each other.

weblin is the smallest possible fix. It doesn't replace your friends. It doesn't build another social network. It just makes visible the people who were already on the same page as you.

I don't know if we'll make it all the way. But I know we'll have tried to build one thing on the internet where people meet the way they should have been meeting all along.

Thanks for reading.

Heiner

Founder · weblin

Behind this

The people
building weblin.

A small team that's been quietly building this for years — across two decades of watching the web change, and deciding what it should have stayed.

Ralf

Founder · Engineering

Has been building weblin since the beginning. Writes the code that makes people visible on any page of the web — and keeps the protocol open so it can't be owned.

Christine

Community · Partnerships

Leads community, moderation, and partner outreach. The person at festivals, on calls, in the inbox — holding the line between what we build and what people actually need.

Allan

Product · Design

Shapes what weblin looks and feels like — from avatar details to the shape of a speech bubble. Believes a quiet interface is its own kind of care.

The invitation

This campaign isn't about
funding a product.

It's about proving the web can feel human again.

weblin already exists. We've been building it for years because we believe the internet should feel human again. This campaign decides whether it stays a small experiment — or grows into something that reaches millions of people.

Then

Communities were tied to platforms, not to the web itself. Small experiments died when those platforms closed their doors.

Now

Browsers are powerful. Privacy tooling is mature. People are actively searching for something less loud, less lonely, more real.

If we succeed, the people supporting this today won't just be users.
They'll be the ones who helped bring real presence back to the web.

Why we're on Kickstarter

Not to invent something.
To make what's finished reach the people.

We've built as much as two people could build on their own. The rest needs hands, time, and a little money to run. Here's where every euro goes.

Launch Thoughts

The infrastructure to post, vote, and moderate thoughts on every page of the web.

Build the app

iOS and Android, so weblin lives where you already are — not just at your desk.

Scale gently

Servers, moderation, translations, support. The quiet work that keeps things from breaking.

Reach the next 100k

Festivals, communities, small circles. The people who've been waiting for something like this.

Every euro goes into code, infrastructure, and people. None of it goes into ads.

Preview the backer tiers

Pick your way in.

Digital rewards, community status, shared ownership. No plastic, no shipping. Each tier includes everything from the ones below it.

€15

Supporter

Badge on your avatar
Name in the supporter list
Community access & updates

€75

Dancer

Exclusive dance emote
1 of 10 backer-only avatars
Funder title in your profile

Plug weblin into your
festival, magazine, membership.

weblin works everywhere. But some places — an event page, a publisher's article hub, a members-only community — deserve a deeper fit. We work with partners to embed it right.

Festivals & events

Your attendees on the lineup page, the campsite FAQ, the afterparty thread. weblin turns an event microsite into a pre-event clubhouse.

Publishers & writers

Readers of the same essay, in the same room. Thoughts on every article, visible avatars on the homepage — the comment layer your CMS never had.

Niche communities

Your members are already on the same few pages of the web. weblin turns that scatter into a space — with your branding, your rules, your audience.

Partner with us 20-minute intro call, in writing first if you prefer.

Before you commit

Questions we've actually been asked.

The short, honest answers. Nothing we wouldn't say to a friend over coffee.

Why another app?

It isn't an app. It's a layer. You don't open weblin — weblin appears on pages you already visit. No new feed to check, no new inbox to maintain. If it disappeared tomorrow, your browsing wouldn't break.

Why now? This idea existed before.

It did. Our founder built the first weblin in 2007 — and the web wasn't ready. Browsers were slow, privacy tooling barely existed, and people hadn't yet tired of platforms. Today they have. The ground finally lines up with the idea.

What happens to my URLs — do you track them?

No. URLs are hashed on your device before they ever leave. We couldn't sell what you read even if we wanted to — we don't have it. The mechanism is patented and open source, so anyone can verify it.

What if the Kickstarter campaign doesn't hit its goal?

Every backer gets a full refund from Kickstarter — that's how the platform works. On our side, we keep building with our existing self-funding, just slower. weblin doesn't die if this campaign misses. It just grows at a different pace.

Will it really stay free forever?

Yes, for individuals. The core extension, the mobile app, Thoughts — all free, no subscription, no premium tier for end users. Our revenue model is partner integrations (festivals, publishers, communities) and open-source grants. If that ever stops being enough, we'll ask the community before we change anything.

How do you keep it from becoming a toxic place?

Three things. First: Thoughts fade after 7 days — no permanent record to be weaponized. Second: you can ignore everyone on a page with one click, and block individuals across all pages. Third: a community-run moderation layer with transparent rules, clear reporting, and a Trust & Safety lead on the team from day one of the launch.

Is it only for Chrome?

No. The extension works in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox today. Safari support and the iOS/Android apps are the top priorities for Kickstarter funding. By the end of 2026, weblin should run on every browser and every device where your browsing happens.

Who are you, really?

Lupus Labs UG, based in Hamburg. Heiner (founder, built the first weblin in 2007, sold to Sulake/Habbo in 2008) and Marvin (Kickstarter, partnerships, community) lead the project. The code is open source on GitHub as lupuslabs/n3qExt. You can see every line we've ever shipped.

Every webpage is a community.
Now you can meet it.

Not another platform.
A layer on top of the web
that connects everyone on the same page.