How Gifthood works under the hood
- What's a handle, and why do I sign in with one?
Your handle is your name on the open social web — it looks like a little web address, something like
marisol.example.com. Gifthood is built on the same open network as apps like Bluesky, so one account works across many apps. When you sign in to Gifthood, you're just telling us which account is yours.- Do I need a separate Gifthood account?
No. If you already have a Bluesky account (or an account anywhere on the same open network), you sign in to Gifthood with it. Same neighbors, same you — no new password to invent.
- Why doesn't Gifthood ever ask for my password?
When you sign in, we send you to the place that hosts your account, you enter your password there, and they send you back with a note saying "yes, that's really them." Gifthood never sees or stores your password. It works like "Sign in with Google," except no single big company sits in the middle.
- Can I really take my account and posts somewhere else?
Yes — that's the quiet superpower of the open network. Your account and everything you post belong to you, not to Gifthood. If you ever want to leave, you can move your account to another host or another app and your identity and posts go with you. We'd rather you stay because you like it here, not because leaving is hard.
- What can other people see?
- Your listings are public posts — the title, description, photos, and an approximate area travel the open network, like a public post on Bluesky.
- Your exact location is never published. Gifthood only ever shows a roomy ~1.2 km area, and photos are scrubbed of location data before upload. Precise details are yours to share one-to-one — see the Community Rules for how we keep hand-offs safe.
- Messages are not public. Conversations happen inside Gifthood and are stored privately — see the Privacy Policy for the fine print.
- Who runs Gifthood?
Gifthood is a small community project, not a venture-backed company. We run the app you're looking at and the index that powers the nearby feed. Your account lives wherever you choose to host it — which is exactly the point: even the people who run Gifthood don't own your place on the network.