Circles: audiences you actually control

The audience is the point

Ask ten people why they hesitate to post on a mainstream social network and roughly seven of them will describe an audience mismatch. The photo is fine for close friends. It's fine for family. It is not fine for your boss, your grandmother, and a recruiter you barely know — all of whom sit in the same "friends" list.

The 2010s' answer to this was the private/public switch: either everyone in your list sees a post, or nobody outside your list does. That works for a certain kind of poster. For most people it doesn't, because most of the discomfort about posting doesn't happen at the fence around your friends list — it happens inside it.

Circles are Seldeo's answer to that inside-the-fence problem.

What a Circle is

A Circle is a named group of friends you curate on your device. When you post to a Circle, only the people in it can see the post. When you post to two Circles, someone who is in both sees the post once, with no indication that you chose more than one audience. When you remove someone from a Circle, they lose access to future posts to that Circle — never past ones.

Circles are private to you. A friend can't see which Circles they're in, or which Circles exist on your account. That's a strict rule and it drives a lot of the smaller design choices: Circle names never appear in reactions, notifications, share sheets, or app-wide search.

Common Circles our beta users have created:

• Close friends (median size: 12)
• Family
• Roommates
• Work colleagues — used only for posts that are safe for the work audience
• A specific event — one wedding weekend, one road trip, one memorial gathering

The event-scoped Circle is the surprise. We expected people to build one or two permanent Circles and share to them for years. What people actually do is create short-lived event Circles, post into them for a week, and then leave them alone.

Every post starts here

The audience picker is the first control on every post composer. It has four states:

1. Everyone — public. Reachable via profile view and share link. Indexable by external search engines if the account is set to allow it.
2. Friends — everyone on your friends list. Default for new accounts.
3. Circle — one or more Circles you've defined.
4. Only me — a private save, useful for drafting or journaling.

The picker never resets between composes. If your last post was to a Circle called "Family," your next post starts in that Circle too. That is deliberate: it prevents the failure mode where you post to Family, close the app for two hours, come back to post something you'd never send Family, and forget to re-check the audience.

The one exception: public posts don't stick. If your last post was public, the next composer starts on Friends, not public. Widening back to public takes an explicit tap. This is the one place we chose asymmetry over consistency, because the cost of accidentally posting private content publicly is much higher than the cost of accidentally posting public content to friends.

What Circles are not

Circles are not lists that friends can join or request access to. Nobody is notified when they're added to a Circle. Nobody can ask to be added.

Circles are not a follower model. Seldeo is a friends-of-friends network: two people are connected only after both sides accept. Circles filter that connection graph; they don't extend it.

Circles are not shared. Two friends who each have a Circle called "Family" are curating two independent audiences that happen to share a name.

Auto-suggested Circles

If you enable Suggest Circles under Settings → Privacy → Personalisation, Seldeo suggests new Circles based on who reacts to and replies to your posts. The suggestion is computed on-device from publicly visible engagement metadata; the underlying data never leaves the phone, and neither the suggestion inputs nor the suggestion outputs are sent to our servers.

You'll see a "Suggested" chip in the Circles list when a new suggestion is ready. Tap to review, edit, or dismiss. Suggestions are advisory only — nothing changes on your account until you save the Circle yourself.

Deleting a Circle

Settings → Circles → [Circle name] → Delete Circle removes the Circle from your device and stops future posts from being targeted to it. Posts you already published to the Circle stay visible to the people who were in it at publish time. If you want to also revoke access to those older posts, delete the posts individually or archive them.

What we learned in the first month

• Average Circle count per active user: 3. Median: 2. That's much lower than the "define ten Circles" pattern we designed for. Two Circles ("Close friends" and "Family") plus the friends-list default covers the vast majority of the sharing people do on Seldeo.
• Event Circles are transient. They're created, posted to for one to three weeks, then abandoned. We initially thought we needed a "sunset" flow to hide dormant Circles from the picker. We don't — a small "Recent" section at the top of the picker turned out to be enough.
• Circle sizes are small. The largest common Circle ("Family") has a median size of 8. "Close friends" has a median size of 12. The intuition that people naturally cap their close audiences at Dunbar-adjacent numbers holds up.

Where to next

Circles v2 (planned for later this year) will bring:

• Smart merge suggestions for people who've built two Circles that mostly overlap.
• Circle-scoped stories — pick a Circle audience on the story composer, not just on the post composer.
• A "post to more" prompt that, when a post has been sitting unread by everyone in a small Circle for 24 hours, gently suggests widening the audience.

Circles are one of the reasons Seldeo exists. If you're using them in a way we didn't design for and it's working, please tell us at product@seldeo.com. Feature choices come out of that mailbox more than anywhere else.