BeMatrx has no ranking algorithm in its feed. One thing decides what you see: who you follow. Your feed shows the people you follow and your own posts, newest first. Some people assume this is a feature we just haven't built yet. It's actually the decision I thought about longest, so here's how it came about.
What bothered me
It started with a personal unease. If I looked at something a bit too long, it kept turning up in front of me for days afterward, and that always felt odd to me. Maybe nobody was watching me, but I could tell that what I saw was being picked using information gathered about me.
I didn't want that in a place I was building. So privacy wasn't a setting added later; it was the first decision I made. I didn't remove a ranking algorithm, I never wrote one. Below is how that decision turned into a city.
The question we started with
In the first sketch we asked ourselves: in a real city, who decides who you run into? Nobody, really. You run into your neighbour because you live on the same street, you hear your friend's news because you're friends, and you find out what's going on in the square because you walked through it. Nobody ranks anything or hands out scores. There's proximity and there are relationships, and things happen in order.
When we wrote that on the whiteboard, we realised cities have worked this way for centuries. Our job was not to break that in the app.
We didn't remove an algorithm, we never built one
I use that sentence in interviews because it's the most accurate way to put it. From the first sketch, one thing decided what showed up in front of you: who you follow. The order was by time, newest first. We didn't do this to save effort, and it wasn't a limitation we later dressed up as a philosophy.
It lets us make a promise we're comfortable with: when you ask "why am I seeing this?", the answer is always one sentence. Someone you chose to follow posted it recently.
What decides what you see
Who you follow, and that's it. Just as you decide who to spend time with in real life, here you choose whose news you want to get. Your own posts are in your feed too. Where you live matters in BeMatrx, about as much as it does in a real city: it decides who you're likely to run into, which squares you pass through, who sees you walk into the café. That's where you meet people. Once you follow someone, their posts come to your feed.
The order is by time only, newest to oldest. The post at the top is the latest thing someone you follow shared. It sounds like a small promise, but the rest of the design is built around keeping it.
A feed that ends
What surprises people most is how calm the feed is. It fills up as fast as life around you does, and then it ends. When there's nothing new, you can see that and you leave, like getting up after visiting a friend.
That's also why what people share here carries some weight. A promotion at work, a new home, a friendship moving forward: these reach the people who chose to follow you, along with the city where they happened. In a small feed, moments like that don't get lost in the crowd.
Where a living world fits
It might sound odd to say this in a post about an app without a feed algorithm, but we don't see BeMatrx as a replacement for anything. The apps on your phone are good at what they do, and a living world isn't competing with them for the same hour. What it wants is for one hour of your day to leave something behind.
The case I like best is when the two work together. Your career goes up a step in BeMatrx, or you rent your first home, you're proud of it, and you share it wherever your friends will see it. Our job is to give you things worth sharing. Where you share them is up to you.
The measure we chose
A feed that ends means people spend less time in the app. We chose that knowingly; how long you stay was never our measure. I should be clear here: I'm not saying we measure nothing. We measure which screen was opened, how long it stayed open, and which post came into view in the feed, because otherwise I can't see where the app gets stuck. Your typed text and the images on your screen are not part of it. This data is stored on servers in Europe, and one switch in Settings turns it off right away. My line is this: nothing we measure is used to choose what you see. The only thing that goes back into the app from measurement is whether a section is switched on, and that's the same for everyone. When you leave the app, what stays behind is your career, your city and the people who'd notice you're gone. We know this choice has a cost.
I wrote about what a living world is and how the category works in this post. How someone with no software training built the product is in the story of building BeMatrx with Claude Code.
