About
There are maybe 100 to 200 people in any city you'd actually want to build with. People who think in systems, who ask real questions, who do things without waiting for permission. The problem is they're scattered across neighborhoods and social circles and they never meet.
mutual.city is an attempt to fix that. It's a knowledge graph that connects people, texts, events, and projects through worldview rather than demographics or job titles. Every entity gets a phare: 240 characters that compress how you see the world. Not a bio. Not a resume. How you actually think.
Where this came from
In October 2024, someone named Alex put up a missed-connection poster on College Street in Toronto. He was apologizing to a woman in a red shirt. Most people would have let it go. He made 125 posters.
I made a response poster. Not to Alex specifically, but to anyone like him — anyone who valued agency enough to broadcast themselves to strangers. My poster said I was smart, extroverted, energetic. I put my email on it. A few people wrote in. One or two turned into real conversations. The idea was simple: what if you could broadcast your beliefs and values to the city and see who responds?
That experiment became PHARE, a conversational tool that compresses your worldview to 240 characters. PHARE became mutual.city when I realized one person's phare is interesting but a graph of phares is useful. People connected to the books that shaped them, the events where they showed up, the projects they're building.
How it works
You have a conversation with AI. Not small talk. It asks about your beliefs, your tensions, your frameworks, what energizes you. After 20-30 exchanges it compresses everything into a phare. You edit it until it feels right.
Then you browse. When someone else's phare hits you, you reach out. Discovery by worldview, not by what school you went to or what company you work at.
Why we charge
Creating your phare and browsing are free. Premium is $10/month for unlimited entity links, URL extraction, priority browse placement, and phare analytics. See pricing.
The philosophy is simple: sustainable, not extractive. We don't sell your data. We don't run engagement-maximizing algorithms. There's no feed designed to keep you scrolling. You come here to find people, and then you go meet them.
Team
mutual.city is built by Erin Saint Gull in Toronto. Full-stack development, design, community building. If you want to collaborate, the best way is to create a phare and reach out.