Prototype User Stories

Seven short stories — one for each research prototype — written for anyone who wants to understand what we're building and why, without needing a technical background.

Each story shows a real situation where the prototype would help. At the end of each story you'll find a link to the full technical details.

Story 1: The Journalist and the Source

Leila is an investigative journalist based in Berlin. At a press conference in Istanbul she meets Yusuf, a civil servant who has documents she needs — documents that could embarrass powerful people in his government.

They both know the risks. Yusuf cannot email her. His government monitors email traffic. He cannot use WhatsApp — the country has a legal gateway that can intercept messages from major apps. He doesn't want to call. And sending files through any service with servers in his country is out of the question.

At the conference, standing next to each other, Leila opens the app and shows Yusuf a QR code on her screen. He scans it with his phone. That's it — they're connected. No phone numbers exchanged. No accounts created. No server in any country recorded that these two people know each other.

Back home, when Yusuf is ready to share something, he opens the app. His message travels through the Tor network — a system that bounces internet traffic through several countries in an encrypted tunnel, so that no single point in the network can see both who sent a message and who received it. Leila's phone, running its own part of the same system, receives it. Nobody in the middle — not the app maker, not Yusuf's government, not Leila's ISP — sees anything except meaningless encrypted data going somewhere unknown.

Yusuf shares what he knows. Leila protects her source. The story gets told.

What this prototype proves: That two people who meet in person can establish a private, anonymous communication channel that works over the internet — with no accounts, no phone numbers, and no server that can be compelled to hand over records.

→ Technical details: Prototype 1 — Tor-Only Encrypted Chat

Story 2: The Festival

It's Friday evening at a three-day outdoor music festival. Marco has come with seven friends. There's no cell signal — 40,000 people and one tower. Data is unusable. Everyone's battery is precious.

Halfway through the first night, the group splits across three stages. Marco needs to find Priya. He has no idea where she is. He can't call. He can't text. He can't post to a group chat.

He opens the app. Priya shows up — she's somewhere within about 30 metres, close enough for Bluetooth to reach. He sends her a message. Her phone buzzes. They find each other in two minutes.

Over the weekend the group coordinates entirely through the app, phone-to-phone, no internet, no cell tower. Who's at which stage. Where to meet for food. Who has the painkillers. The messages travel a few metres through the air, phone to phone, encrypted so only the right person can read them. When two people aren't close enough, a mutual friend's phone can relay the message along silently — like passing a note through the crowd.

On Sunday evening, packing up, Marco's phone still has 40% battery. His friends using other messaging apps are on their last percent.

What this prototype proves: That phones can discover each other and exchange messages over Bluetooth with no infrastructure whatsoever — no internet, no cell towers, no WiFi, no accounts.

→ Technical details: Prototype 2 — P2P Bluetooth Messenger

Story 3: The First Meeting

Amara runs a community garden in her neighbourhood. Every month she hosts a meeting in the community hall. New people come. She wants a way to stay in touch with them — but she's tired of collecting phone numbers that go into a spreadsheet nobody trusts. She doesn't want to add strangers to a WhatsApp group that exposes everyone's numbers to everyone else.

At the next meeting, she explains the app to the newcomers. "No phone numbers," she says. "No accounts. Just tap phones together."

Across the table, she holds her phone near David's. Both phones buzz softly. A small confirmation appears: Connected to a new contact. That's the moment — a tiny cryptographic handshake happened in the time it takes to blink. Amara's phone and David's phone have exchanged the mathematical keys they'll use to verify each other in the future. No server was involved. No third party saw it happen.

Next month, David arrives at the community hall. Before he even opens the app, his phone quietly notices Amara's phone is nearby. A subtle indicator lights up: Contact nearby. He taps it and their messages from last month are right there, synced automatically over Bluetooth as they walked into the same room.

He didn't have to do anything. They just have to be in the same place.

What this prototype proves: That two phones can establish a trust relationship in person — through a physical gesture, not a form — and then automatically recognise each other in the future using Bluetooth, without revealing identity to bystanders.

→ Technical details: Prototype 3 — Proximity Discovery & Key Exchange

Story 4: The Community Garden Feed

The Eastside Community Garden has 34 members. They share everything — planting schedules, tool borrowing, surplus harvests, meeting notes. Currently this lives in a WhatsApp group, a shared Google Doc nobody remembers to update, and a physical noticeboard that gets rained on.

Rosa, who manages the garden's digital life, sets up the app. Each member gets their own private feed — like a private blog, except it's not on any server. The posts live on their phones. When two members come within Bluetooth range of each other, their phones quietly synchronise what's new. No internet needed.

Rosa posts an update about the courgette glut. Over the next week, as members pass through the garden, their phones pick it up — from Rosa's phone directly, or from another member's phone that already received it. The post propagates organically, the way news spreads through a community: person to person, only among people who are actually connected.

Crucially, only garden members can read the posts. Rosa's updates are encrypted to her contact list. Someone who lives next door and has the app installed cannot read anything — they're not in the contact list. The garden's internal communications are genuinely private, even though there's no password, no login, no server to protect.

During a storm that takes out the neighbourhood internet for two days, the garden's communication works exactly as normal.

What this prototype proves: That an encrypted, append-only social feed can exist entirely on users' devices — replicating itself between phones through proximity, with no server, no internet, and no ability for outsiders to read it.

→ Technical details: Prototype 4 — Encrypted Append-Only Feed

Story 5: The Community Space

The Crossroads Community Centre runs weekly drop-in sessions, a food bank, a legal advice clinic, and a youth club. Hundreds of people pass through each week. Many have prepaid phones with limited data. Some don't speak English well. Most don't trust apps that require creating accounts or signing up to terms and conditions they can't easily read.

The centre's coordinator, Jonah, sets up a small Raspberry Pi — a computer about the size of a deck of cards — in the back office. It runs continuously, connected to the centre's WiFi. When people arrive and connect to the centre's WiFi network, their phones can communicate through it: messages, announcements, even small files.

A volunteer posts an announcement about a free clothing swap next Saturday. Over the course of the day, everyone who visits the centre and connects to the WiFi sees it appear — not because they followed anyone or joined a group, but because their phone synced with the local server while they were in the building. No internet left the building. No company received the data. The announcement lived entirely on local hardware.

When someone sends a message to a volunteer, the message is encrypted on their phone before it's sent to the Pi. The Pi stores it until the volunteer's phone next connects and picks it up. The Pi never reads the message — it's like a locked post box that only the recipient can open.

Even when the centre's internet connection goes down — which happens — everything keeps working. The Pi is the internet, for this room.

What this prototype proves: That a small, inexpensive device can act as a local communication hub for a community space — storing and forwarding encrypted messages without being able to read them, requiring no internet connection, and working seamlessly for people who arrive and leave throughout the day.

→ Technical details: Prototype 5 — Local WiFi Relay Server

Story 6: The Dead Drop

A small group of community organisers meets irregularly. They don't all know each other. They operate with enough caution that they don't want a messaging group where everyone can see who else is in it. They want asynchronous communication — the ability to leave a message for someone without both people needing to be in the same place at the same time.

In the back room of a cooperative café that several of them use regularly, there is a small device the size of a matchbox, plugged into a USB socket. It looks like a phone charger . It's a Bluetooth relay.

When Maya visits the café and orders her coffee, her phone quietly connects to the relay over Bluetooth. There are two messages waiting for her — left by people she knows, at different times, when she wasn't there. Her phone picks them up. She reads them at the table, replies, and her replies are stored on the relay for the others to collect when they next visit.

Nothing was sent over the internet. No servers outside the café were involved. The café owner doesn't know the device is a message relay — it looks like a charger. The messages are encrypted; even if someone examined the device, they'd find only blobs of data they cannot read.

The relay holds messages for up to 72 hours, then discards them. There is no permanent record. People simply have to visit within that window — which, for people who meet regularly in the same space, is easy.

What this prototype proves: That a tiny, inexpensive piece of hardware can act as an asynchronous Bluetooth message relay — a physical dead drop — allowing people to exchange encrypted messages without ever being online simultaneously or in the same place at the same time.

→ Technical details: Prototype 6 — BLE Dead Drop

Story 7: The Valley

Nadia lives in a mountain valley. The nearest cell tower is fifteen kilometres away. Coverage is intermittent — three bars on a good day, nothing after heavy snowfall when the microwave link to the base station goes down. A dozen families are scattered across thirty square kilometres of farmland and forest.

A few years ago, after a three-day outage during a winter storm left the valley completely cut off, Nadia's neighbour Eitan started looking for alternatives. He bought a pair of LoRa radio modules — small circuit boards with antennas, about the size of a thick phone charger — and set up a mesh that covered the valley. Now each family has one. They cost about twenty euros each and run for two days on a small battery.

When Nadia wants to send a message, she types it on her phone. It travels over Bluetooth to her radio, which transmits it as a burst of radio waves — a fraction of a second of chirped signal at 868 MHz that travels kilometres through the air, far beyond anything Bluetooth or WiFi could reach. Within a minute or two, Eitan's radio picks it up directly, or another neighbour's radio relays it on.

The messages are encrypted on Nadia's phone before they leave. By the time the signal is in the air, it is ciphertext — meaningless to anyone who might be listening with their own radio receiver, which is easy to buy and trivially easy to build. Only the intended recipient's device has the keys to read it.

The radio signals travel slowly by internet standards. A short message takes a second or two to transmit. There are regulations about how often a device is allowed to transmit in the radio band, so the system cannot send a flood of messages — it is paced, like sending telegrams rather than streaming video. Nobody sends photos. It is not a replacement for broadband. But for "the road is blocked after the storm" or "the generator is running — power until 8pm" or "is everyone okay?" it works. It works when nothing else does.

What this prototype proves: That kilometre-range encrypted messaging is achievable with twenty-euro off-the-shelf hardware and no infrastructure — and that the same cryptographic principles protecting short-range Bluetooth messages apply equally to LoRa's kilometre-scale radio signals, within the severe bandwidth constraints the technology imposes.

→ Technical details: Prototype 7 — LoRa Radio Mesh

How the Stories Connect

Each prototype solves a different real-world problem. Together, they cover the full range of situations a privacy-first social app needs to handle:

None of these prototypes is the finished product. Each is a small, focused experiment that proves one piece of the larger puzzle. The full technical analysis explains what each prototype is built on and what we expect to learn from it.