Small friend groups and accountability

Why small

Public habit feeds do not work for most people. Either you perform for strangers or you ignore the whole thing. What works is three to six people you actually know, seeing a short list of things you said you would do.

That is a Circle: a private group of up to 8 members, invite-only, with no public discovery. Nobody can find your Circle, and nobody in it can see anything you did not choose to share.

What is in a Circle

Deliberately not much:

• A feed of automatic events: check-ins on shared habits, streak milestones, and people joining
• Reactions on those events, from a fixed set of five (flame, clap, flex, sparkle, heart), one per person per event
• Nudges: four preset messages, one per person per day
• An optional weekly leaderboard, off by default, ranking by completion percentage of shared habits

There is no chat. That is not an oversight. Group chats about habits turn into group chats about everything, and then nobody checks in. A Circle is a place to see that your friends showed up, tap a flame, and get on with your day.

Setting one up

Create a Circle with a name, an emoji and a color. Share the invite link or the QR code. Invite links can be revoked at any time if one gets forwarded somewhere it should not go.

On Free you can be in one Circle, including one you created. Pro lets you join as many as you like and create up to five. For most people one is plenty: the Circle with the people who matter.

Sharing habits into it

Each habit has a visibility setting: private, or shared with a specific Circle. For shared habits, members see the name, icon, today's status and your streak. They never see notes, mood, or any habit you kept private.

Share the habits you want witnessed, not everything. A Circle built around one thing often works best:

• A running or walking group sharing Morning walk
• Gym friends sharing Strength session, three a week
• A reading group sharing pages

Keep the journal private. Keep the skincare private. The Circle is for the habits that benefit from company.

Nudges without pressure

The four nudges are "You've got this", "Don't break the streak", "Proud of you", and "Quick check-in?". You can send one per person per day, delivered as a push and in the app. Because they are presets, they cannot be sharp, and because they are limited, they cannot be constant.

Anyone can mute a sender or a whole Circle. Muting is quiet; nobody is told. If a Circle gets loud, mute it for a week rather than leaving.

The leaderboard question

The leaderboard is off by default on purpose. Turn it on if the group is competitive in a friendly way and everyone knows it. Leave it off if anyone in the group would feel bad being last, because somebody is always last. It ranks by weekly completion percentage of shared habits, so a person with one shared habit done every day beats a person with six shared habits done most days.

Being a good Circle member

• React more than you nudge. A flame costs nothing and says "I saw."
• Nudge in the evening, when the day is still open, not at 8am.
• Do not comment on a reset streak. What to do after you miss a day is the right tone: neutral, forward-looking, done.
• Celebrate milestones. They show up in the feed at 3, 7, 14, 30 days and beyond, and that is what the feed is for.

Safety and exits

You can leave any Circle at any time. Owners can remove members and hand over ownership. You can block someone, and you can report a member, which goes to a human on our side. Shared streaks and feeds are just data; a Circle is never a lock on your account.

Try it in Sweepifi

Make one Circle with three or four people, share one habit each, and agree to react every day for two weeks. If the group is really just two of you, keeping habits with a partner describes Partner mode, which adds shared habits and a shared streak. A good first shared habit is Text a friend, which is pleasantly circular.