Build your own little internet

Tonk is an opinionated state management framework for coding with AI. It's analogous to Ruby on Rails, but for AI, and optimised for putting users in control of their data (rather than platforms).

The principles guiding Tonk's development are:

1. Any app from any ecosystem should be able to call any data from any user (if the user permits),
2. Data custodians should reliably cede control to users,
3. The infrastructure should be immune to feature creep and platform degradation.

Tonk achieves this with:

• Local-first architecture
• Integrations with your data*
• Distributed access control*

* under development

Tonk has already been used to build grassroots apps:

Bazbot

An AI clone that plugs into local data and uses distributed access control

Moody Me

A personal mood diary that keeps data private

Vin Voyager

An independent, pared-back productivity tool

We expect Tonk to be especially helpful for building "homecooked software" in a private, independent, flexible way. We think it will come in two waves. The first wave is for builders that seek privacy & independence:

• Private alternatives to cloud apps, such as photo sharing for you and your family,
• Lightweight hosting for personal websites,
• Ad-free, idiosyncratic chatrooms that are deeply customised with whiteboards, games, calendars & whatever your community needs.

As applications build up information within user-owned, interoperable data stores, Tonk become useful for effortlessly remixing your data:

• Building apps that don't require users to migrate from a competitor - for example, a mindfulness app that syncs with users' health data rather than recreating it from scratch,
• Instantly synchronising todos with collaborators across different todo apps for ephemeral projects without all moving into one project manager,
• Sharing content recommendation algorithms for particular moods - that index on your personal cross-platform taste,
• Using an application but staying on a familiar UI that the default app updated away from,
• Freely adding features to apps, such as an AI historian that points out places of interest on your maps app,
• One single interface for your different chat apps, calendar apps, todo apps and social feeds,
• Providing a single chat history that community members can sync with from any chat app, instead of fragmenting your audiences across different conversations.

The ideas behind Tonk are similar to:

• Urbit, but more multiplayer and navigable;
• AT Protocol / Bluesky, but keeps data private to you and your communities;
• Ethereum, but faster & more private than a blockchain;
• Supabase, but more lightweight and multiplayer-friendly than a traditional database.

The Tonk team is focussed on building something delightful for our target audience. In taking Tonk to market, we are also betting that it will start a new type of network that uses frontier cryptography & distributed systems to liberate the web from platform overhead. Tonk apps are designed to form maximally-interoperable, user-controlled networks that start to look like new "little internets". This will make the web feel less scary, less extractive and more fun.

Over time as AI improves we expect Tonk to become available for noncoders.

Tonk Labs is a London-based startup. Find out more, or book a call with the CEO.