🌲 Welcome to the Forest, Start here

Hello 👋 Welcome to the forest.

This is DFOS home, the front door into the dark forest. DFOS is the operating system for shared private internets. A digital space you control, built through trust. You decide who's in, what's open, and what stays private. No advertising, no selling your data, no AI training on your work. Learn more about DFOS here.

What's on this desktop?

DFOS blog + chat + resources: Platform updates, protocol news, product releases live on the blog 🔗. Join the chat to share feedback, bugs, and ideas 🔗. Find links to our knowledge base and protocol documentation in the resource folder 🔗.

Community blog + chat: this is for you. Post your thoughts, work, whatever's worth more than a quick message, in the blog 🔗. The Floor is our main chat room for day-to-day conversation 🔗.

Spacekeepers group: this is where people building their own spaces on DFOS gather. It’s also where we host Spacecamp, our program for starting or growing a space. Keep an eye out on the calendar for the next cohort! 🔗

Podcast: the full New Creative Era archive. Season 1 is about Creative Practice, Season 2 is about the Dark forest. Start anywhere. 🔗

+ a few things from our universe, including some stuff for sale, on the desktop.

How to show up

Introduce yourself in the groupchat. Who you are, what you make, what brought you here, then stay. Drop into conversations, post something, respond to someone. The group is as alive as the people in it.

Tips

• DFOS on your phone: Open DFOS in your phone browser and add it to your home screen. Works just like an app. Turn on notifications so you don't miss anything. video tutorial 🔗

• Make a space: Click the (+) in the bottom left corner to start a space.

• Explore spaces: Click the telescope in the left sidebar to find our directory of public spaces.

One more thing

Come say hi in our monthly forest gatherings, the last thursday of every month at 2pm EST. Spacekeepers share what they're building, ask questions, and we get meet each other :) Join here 🔗

Who made this?

We are Metalabel Studios. We’ve been building tools that help creative people work together online since 2021. You might know us from Metalabel, the collaborative publishing platform.

While building it, we watched the public internet become increasingly hostile. Platforms extract and sell our data, feeds are noisier, relationships turn transactional. These platforms were never built for us. The people we most want to build with keep going private. But none of us wanted to stop sharing our work. We just wanted to choose who we shared it with, on infrastructure that shared our values. So we built the place we wanted: digital space you own, with the people you choose. That's DFOS.

Welcome to the shared private internet, where we build the worlds we want to see.

We're glad you're here!

— The DFOS Team