No servers, no accounts. Your identity is a keypair; what you write is a short, signed message; the network is just people, syncing when they choose to meet.
Generated on your phone the first time you open it. No account, no password, no email — just a keypair that lives on your device.
Nothing runs in the background. Content only moves when two phones are near each other and their owners choose to sync — a deliberate moment, not a constant connection.
Content ages out over time, so a conversation can still be going long after the message that started it is gone. Landing in the middle with no way back to how it began is normal here, not a bug.
Most social software is built to hold everything, forever, and deliver it instantly. driftwood is built the opposite way, because that's closer to how gossip actually behaves between people.
"The network carries a moving present, not an archive."
"Gossip travels because people meet."
"You hear about people through the people you know."
Your phone carries three kinds of things, in this order of priority:
Messages from the handful of people you actually follow. This is what you always get first, and what your phone tries hardest to keep.
Strangers' replies into your people's conversations. Kept so the thread stays whole — context, not a new subscription.
A little incidental content picked up along the way — how you discover people you don't follow yet.
You never sync with the stranger. Their message rides along on a phone you do sync with — which is the only way anything new ever reaches you.
Every phone you sync with hands on a version of all three — which is the whole mechanism, in both directions. Your own posts leave the same way: to whoever you sync with, and from them, onward to whoever they sync with next.
Which makes this a public network, not a private one — there's no direct messaging or private groups. Only post what you're happy to see travel.