We were going to lots of concerts and hikes and realised friends wanted to come, after the moment. But even knowing this, we hesitated to post in our group chat. Would it be annoying?

Events posted on social media felt like too much of an announcement when we just wanted to see if anyone fancied coming along.

When you share something that's coming up, you can pick an awareness goal- a single bit of info that tells your circle that you're going anyway, no expectations, or you're sussing interest. This is central to Toovn. It replaces the ambiguities and clutter of group chat messages, or social media events, with something explicit but light.

Events from your circles, with clear signals about what people want and clear signals about what the event is. Little announcements at the top describe when someone else decides they're in or significant details change.

When you have no interest in an event you won't see any of the noise around it. No RSVPs, no comments, no changes. As much as it's important that friends don't feel pressure to respond, it's also important that friends don't feel pressure to keep up.

You create small named circles - we call them hoops - and choose which one an event belongs to. A gig with three close friends is not the same audience as a work drinks. Everything posted to a hoop stays private to the people in it. There is no public discovery. You can't stumble across someone else's events.

Each user gets a private, subscribe-only calendar feed. Add it to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, or anything that supports ICS - and every event from your hoops appears automatically. The events even carry context: emoji prefixes show you whether it's a gig you need to check interest on 🤔 or one where someone has a spare ticket going 🎟️.

This means the app is genuinely useful as a behind-the-scenes tool. You only need to open Toovn if you want to respond or share something new. For the day-to-day, it lives quietly in the calendar you already use.

You can ignore ever checking out the app and just keep in the loop with email notifications. Or you can turn those off completely. Whatever works for you.

There's plenty of people who don't want to join social media platforms for plenty of reasons. We hope Toovn can step up here, but know that barrages of notifications are one reason people may avoid apps in the first place. Switching off some (or all) notification types is simple.