farband builds software guided by a small set of firmly held principals — about privacy, resilience, ownership, and independence. Every project starts there.
Privacy is the foundation, not a feature. Every design decision starts from "what does this mean for the person using it?" rather than treating privacy as a constraint to be negotiated away.
That means: no accounts where none are needed, no data collected that isn't strictly necessary, no infrastructure that can read what it carries. Privacy by architecture, not by policy.
Software should work when infrastructure fails. Internet outages, server downtime, network disruptions — these are expected operating conditions, not exceptional cases that justify feature degradation.
That means: direct device-to-device communication where possible, graceful degradation when servers are unreachable, and meaningful operation even without an internet connection at all.
Your data belongs to you — not to a service, a platform, or a company whose interests may not align with yours. You should understand where it goes, control who can see it, and be able to delete it completely and immediately.
That means: no data stored on servers beyond what's required for delivery, no retention after a user leaves, and the ability to self-host every server component so data never leaves infrastructure you control.
Dependence on dominant platforms concentrates power, creates single points of failure, and makes software accountable to those platforms' policies rather than its own values. Google, Apple, AWS, Microsoft — useful tools, but not dependencies to build on if it can be avoided.
That means: no Firebase, no analytics SDKs from platform operators, no cloud infrastructure from the handful of companies that control the majority of the internet's foundations. When servers are needed, they run on hardware controlled by the people who use the software.
Projects
Software that demonstrates what these principals look like in practice — not as abstract commitments, but as working applications.
Ephemeral group messaging. No account. No phone number. End-to-end encrypted. Messages live only on participants' devices — leave the group and everything is gone. Works without the internet.