Fellowing

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Inspiration

Years of struggling with loneliness, ADHD, and pornography led me to build Fellowing. I've been in a men's group for years, and I trust them deeply; they're the people I've always wanted help and support from. But it's hard to be vulnerable on a daily basis in our group chat. I wanted something that would provide more structure for accountability, while not being limited to a single use case like porn or sobriety so that my whole group could use it.

What it does

Fellowing is an app for small groups to practice accountability together. You commit to things, check in regularly (whether you did them or not), and support each other along the way. End-to-end encrypted for privacy.

How we built it

Fellowing is a React Native app built with Jazz Tools, Cloudflare, Expo, and RevenueCat. Jazz handles the hardest parts of the database and end-to-end encryption. The design is a mix of my own taste + Claude helping me do things that would be too tedious to do by hand (such as randomizing the nature scenery per group).

Challenges we ran into

Making the app end-to-end encrypted for privacy was really, really difficult and time-consuming (but necessary IMO). It's a totally different mental model of programming than I was used to. Beyond the core E2EE implementation itself using Jazz Tools (which I forked and self-hosted in Cloudflare), there were many ripple effects that led to further complexity: needing to keep push notifications encrypted, figuring out local-first passkey authentication, introducing moderation controls that Apple requires while maintaining E2EE, having privacy-protecting analytics, and more.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

So far, just getting the app into the App Store and having my own men's group use it (including the Android beta) for the past two months. We've officially ditched our group chat and use Fellowing to check in with each other frequently throughout the week. It's already made a huge difference for us, and feels worth it regardless of whether or not Fellowing grows.

What we learned

The biggest one is that I overestimated how frictionless passkeys are for most people. I initially had passkeys as the only authentication method. They work great when a phone is set up for them, but are a major hassle when not. After seeing first-hand how much some folks struggled with creating a passkey during sign up, I ended up changing the whole account creation process to actually skip any kind of authentication up front and just let people into the app. Then you can create a passkey or save a recovery phrase if you want to be able to sign back in or use Fellowing on another device. This ended up simplifying things in a way that I hadn't initially planned, and I'm grateful for the friction that early users hit to force this change.

What's next for Fellowing

Getting the Android beta into Google Play ASAP.
Building the highest-voted features on Fellowing's in-app roadmap, such as reminder notifications and joint commitments.