I'm Nate. In 2011 I was twelve years old, I opened Facebook, and I hated what I saw. Adverts everywhere. Walls in front of ordinary things. A business model built on collecting people and selling what it learned about them. I didn't know how to program. I decided to build my own social network anyway.
That became DumDarac. Later it became Kaana. When I lost the Kaana domain I had to pick another name, and I found Oxy, from oxygen. Something essential and shared, that doesn't belong to one type of person. It turned out to be a much better name than anything I would have chosen on purpose.
Fourteen years later Oxy is identity infrastructure, a social network, participatory moderation, music, commerce, housing, communication and artificial intelligence. I'm still reluctant to call it a technology company. The applications are the first visible layer of a much longer attempt: building ethical alternatives to systems that exploit people.
I didn't learn programming and then start Oxy. I learned because Oxy kept handing me problems I had no way around.
building Oxy: identity, social, moderation, music, commerce, housing
stack TypeScript, React Native, Expo, Node, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
principles the user is not the product, open source by default, no dark patterns
also FairCoin, a cooperative cryptocurrency
company registered May 2025, after years of experiments and rebuilds
hardest part not the code. The community around itVery badly at first. I didn't know PHP. I searched, read whatever I could find, and tried things until they worked. There was far less useful material online back then, so it was one problem at a time, finding some way through.
At the beginning I uploaded files directly to a server. Then I learned to build a shared file database. Then I linked files to user identifiers. Every few months I discovered that the way I had built something wouldn't scale, or wasn't safe enough, and I replaced it. Over time that turned into OxyCloud, and then into much larger shared infrastructure.
One of the early versions reached around a thousand users. Exciting, and it exposed everything that was weak. Servers didn't cope. Parts of the system broke. I had to rebuild things that looked finished, because they weren't ready for the number of people using them. A screen that loads is not the same as a reliable service.
There were migrations where I nearly lost everything. Systems that failed after months of work. Foundations that turned out to be wrong, so entire parts had to start again. There were periods when I got very depressed about it and seriously thought about leaving Oxy behind. I don't want to turn that into a heroic story where persistence is easy. There were days when opening the laptop again felt impossible.
I kept opening it because I genuinely love creating things, and because I look at the world and find it deeply unfair. People without food or housing while others have more than they could ever need. Wars, manipulation, scams, systems that seem designed to make people feel powerless. Building is my way of responding instead of only watching.
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If the word never costs you anything, it probably doesn't mean very much. The user is not the product. No selling personal data, no advertising layers, no design tricks that make leaving hard. Open by default. Read the code, fork it, take your identity elsewhere. Limits on me, too. No secret admin panels where one person removes whatever they feel like. Reports go through a process, evidence gets reviewed, people can appeal. I don't want to become someone who controls people because he can. I can't prove what money and pressure would do to me in twenty years. So the limits get built now, while I'm still the person who wants them. A system shouldn't be ethical only because its founder promises to be good. |
They look like separate products. They share identity, infrastructure, and a reason for existing. |
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It has to be a real business. Servers cost money, security costs money, and people working on this deserve to be paid. Premium tiers and paid services are fine. What I don't want is so many payment layers that the free version becomes useless. Pay for capacity, professional features, hosting, support. Nobody should have to pay to be respected, to keep control of their identity, or to avoid having their data sold. On investment: I need capital and I understand that investors expect a return. What I won't take is "I'll invest, but now I control the mission". I'm not against every fund that calls itself venture capital, the terms matter more than the label. If the only way to get money is to hand someone the power to make Oxy sell data later, that money is too expensive. |
I want Oxy to have artificial intelligence, and eventually our own models, so we're not permanently dependent on other companies. Not as a feature that looks impressive or justifies another subscription. It should reduce spam, spot coordinated abuse, improve accessibility, help with translation, make discovery useful. What it must not become is a hidden judge. Automation can organise and assist. Serious decisions about people need accountable processes. AI should serve the person, not study the person so somebody else can control them. |
For years I focused on code, because code was the part I could control. I could open the laptop and solve the next technical problem. A community is different. You have to explain the mission, invite people in, give them a real role, and make it easy to contribute something meaningful.
I built a lot of infrastructure. Now I need to build the human structure around it.
| If you are a… | There's a door for you |
|---|---|
| Developer | Any repo above. The SDK and Bloom touch everything |
| Artist or label | Syra, and a fair place to publish |
| Shop or seller | Mercaria, new and second hand side by side |
| Researcher | Attack the reputation design and tell me where it turns ugly |
| Translator or writer | Everything ships in more languages than I can write |
| Organiser or moderator | CrowdSource: juries, evidence, appeals |
| Housing or education | Homiio, and the parts that aren't software yet |
| Institution builder | The skill I'm missing most, and it isn't engineering |
| Supporter or investor | Fund the work without trying to take it away from its purpose |
One community, many doors. You should be able to walk through the one that makes sense to you without understanding the whole building on your first day.
You don't have to agree with me about everything. I specifically need people who'll tell me when something is badly designed, or when an ethical idea creates a different kind of harm.
Oxy running at a much larger scale, having improved real lives, with people in different places building and governing it rather than just using things I made.
And honestly, more time for my family and my own life. Right now I work on this day and night because too much still depends on me. That cannot be the final design. If Oxy needs me awake and watching everything forever, then I failed to build an institution.
Success means Oxy can continue, decide, help people and stay faithful to its purpose even when I'm not in the room.
Oxy didn't appear because somebody spotted a market trend. It started because a twelve year old saw something that felt wrong and tried to build an alternative.
Open to mission aligned collaboration, contributors, and investment that doesn't come with a leash.