Introducing Sheaf

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you already know why we're building Sheaf. Simply Plural is shutting down, and a lot of systems are facing the same question: where does our data go now, can we trust whoever's holding it?, and can we find somewhere we can trust to stick around?

Sheaf is a plurality tracking platform. Members, fronting, switches, custom fields, journaling, polls, fronter notifications for friends - everything you'd expect, built with you in mind. You can use our hosted instance, or you can run the whole thing yourself. It's open source under the AGPL, which means the code is yours to read, audit, fork, and host. No black boxes holding your system's data - we aim to provide an online, cross-platform service designed with the same principles in mind that we live by - control over your own data, transparency, technical openness, and privacy-first design.

We also built Sheaf to be cross-platform, with web, Android, and iOS clients, in addition to wearables support for both Android and Apple, and with a full OpenAPI spec and support for granular scoped API permissions, plus documentation on client design. Want to build a Sheaf client to run on another platform, such as a desktop client? We'd love to see your project.

We support imports from Simply Plural, PluralKit, Tupperbox, Plural Space, Prism, and Octocon (and compatible forks), with more supported soon, so you can bring your data over now. Mobile apps are out on both iOS and Android. We'd rather tell you exactly where we are than make promises before we are ready to; there's plenty still to build, and we're building it in the open and always welcome feedback.

We believe that users should be in control of their own data, so we provide comprehensive data export tools as well as import, and are committing to collaboration with developers of other plurality software on an open data format designed to be interoperable between different software, which we will implement once it is finalised, with the goal of making migration or sync between different tools easier and safer than ever.

Why we're building it this way

We're plural systems, building for plural systems. That's not a tagline - it's the reason the decisions came out the way they did.

When you're finding a home for your system's data, the engineering matters, but it's not the first thing that matters. The first thing is whether the people behind it actually understand what they're holding, and what's at stake. We built Sheaf to be the tool we would otherwise have wanted someone to build, the thing we'd trust ourselves, with our years of experience working behind the scenes in engineering to solve exactly these kinds of challenges.

Our values reflect how we built Sheaf from day one, not an afterthought:

• Privacy first. Your data is yours. The architecture is built around that, and we aim to be transparent about where the limitations of that are (covered in depth in the FAQ).
• Inclusive and Plurality-first. Every system is welcome here regardless of origin. We're not interested in gatekeeping who counts. We are a safe space for all marginalised people.
• Stable and sustainable. Sheaf is designed from day one to be both simple to selfhost at a personal scale, and able to support large concurrent user bases. We look at scalability as something to be solved before it becomes a problem, not after.

You don't have to take our word for any of it. The code is public and the ToS and privacy policy says what we will and won't do. If you're more technically inclined, we also have instructions on how to audit the integrity of our published releases and are the first system tracker project to publish a warrant canary.

We're also interested in pushing the envelope on capabilities, once Sheaf is stable and we have a clearer picture of how Sheaf responds under real load and have heard feedback on the decisions we have made so far. For example, Sheaf implements System Safety, an optional system to prevent destructive actions by logged-in users with an enforced timeout, after having heard of several occasions where one member was able to delete important system information in other trackers with no means for its recovery other than restoring an already-existing backup. The big things matter to us as much as the small things, and we aim to listen to the people who use Sheaf day to day on both.

We're a small team that cares a great deal about getting this right. We have been working in reliability and software engineering for many years, and have a deep understanding both of how software responds as it scales, and how it can fail, and we have the resources, engineering skills, and pure determination to make sure that Sheaf remains stable and sustainable far into the future.

Signups are open

Register on app.sheaf.sh, or host it yourself. To stay updated, join our Discord server or subreddit, or follow our social media accounts listed at the bottom of the page.

We'd love to have you. And if something's broken or missing, tell us. As open source software, we welcome contributions from our users, whether those are in the form of code contributions, bug reports, or just feature suggestions. Open an issue or pull request on GitHub, or discuss it on Discord or Reddit.

Welcome to Sheaf.

-# If you previously participated in our public beta at test.sheaf.sh, please migrate your data as we plan to close this instance at the end of June. We may continue to run a public test environment when we have significant changes we are interested in feedback on, but its availability and the long-term durability of data on it will not be guaranteed past the end of June.