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Go Findable

Someone’s in your Blast Radius.

DELULU tells you when someone nearby is genuinely up for meeting. You go Findable for a while, they do too, and if you both Wave you can talk. That is the whole idea.

No live map of people. No endless swiping. No stranger seeing where you are.

Back the build (opens GoFundMe in a new window)See where it’s up to

Go Make Some Lore.

Four words, and you know how it works

DELULU only has a handful of moving parts, and each one needs both people to agree before anything happens.

  1. 01

    Go Findable

    Be discoverable for a set time. It expires on its own; there is no switch you can leave on by accident.

  2. 02

    Blast Radius

    Choose how far out you are open to. Both people have to be inside the other’s radius for anything to happen.

  3. 03

    Wave

    A light way of saying you are interested. It costs nothing to send and nothing to ignore.

  4. 04

    Match

    Only when you have both waved. One Wave is not a match, and nobody can talk to you until you have said yes.

Same city. Different stories.

This is the app, running

Screenshots from the build on a real phone, not mockups. The names are the app’s own: until two people agree to share their profiles, everyone is a pseudonym and nobody has a photograph.

  • The DELULU home screen. A large electric ring pulses inside fainter rings, above the words “You’re findable” and “3h 47m left”.
    Findable, with the time you have left
  • The people screen. A coral panel headed “1 waved” shows Amber Cirrus, who is up for a pint at the same place, with a “Wave back” button. Below, a list headed “In your Blast Radius”.
    Someone waved, and who
  • The DELULU home screen showing three stacked tiles: “3 matches”, “Amber Cirrus waved”, and “5 in your Blast Radius”.
    What is waiting for you
  • A full-screen celebration reading “It’s a Match!” with two rings meeting at a star, and the line “You both waved — you and Alice”.
    The moment it happens

One step at a time

Create social opportunity, a little at a time

You start out as a presence nearby: a made-up name, what you fancy doing, and a rough sense of how close you are. Your real name and your photograph come later, and only when you have both said so.

Your location stays yours

Nobody else receives your coordinates, your exact distance or your direction. Whether two people are close enough is worked out on the server, and what the app shows is a phrase like “a short walk away”, never a number.

Findable runs out on its own

Being findable lasts for a time you choose, not until you remember to turn it off. When it lapses you are off radar, whether or not you were thinking about it.

Both of you, or neither

One Wave is not a Match. Nobody can message you until you have waved back, sharing profiles takes two, and blocking removes you from each other entirely, both ways.

None of this is a promise to be careful. Each one is enforced on the server, and covered by tests that fail the build if a change would break it.

Built in the open

Where the build actually is

These figures come straight out of the repository when the site is built. They are not typed in by hand, so they cannot flatter.

Milestones complete
13/14
Tests passing
574across 28 files, verified 2026-09-08
Currently on
14 — hardening

The plan, and what is done

  1. Foundation, complete
  2. Authentication & Profiles, complete
  3. Findable / Discovery Sessions, complete
  4. Simulated Location, complete
  5. PostGIS Proximity Discovery, complete
  6. Admin Active User Dashboard & Map, complete
  7. Waves, complete
  8. Mutual Wave / Match, complete
  9. Chat, complete
  10. Chaperone, complete
  11. Block, Report & Moderation, complete
  12. Physical Device Location, complete
  13. Push Notifications, complete
  14. MVP Integration & Hardening, not started

Recent work

The last dozen commits, as written at the time.

  • A definition list that assistive technology can actually read
  • The lock screen was still using real names
  • Deploy the landing page to IONOS, and rebuild it every morning
  • CI: everything cheap on every push, the expensive half before main
  • delulu.energy, which shows the build rather than describing it
  • It was the APNs key, and a swap that changes nothing proves nothing
  • Tools that report the outcome, not the request
  • Notifications sound and look like DELULU
  • Identity is withheld on every surface, not most of them
  • The crowd can wave back, so the receiving half can be tested at all

The fundraiser film, 14 seconds

The fundraiser

Help get DELULU onto real phones

DELULU is built by one person. The app works, it is on hardware, and the discovery loop runs end to end. What it needs now is the unglamorous part: real-world testing, safety and privacy work, infrastructure, a closed beta, and an iOS and Android launch.

Every number in the section above comes out of the codebase, so you can see exactly what has been done with the time so far before deciding whether to back the rest.

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