How you get in
Draft · Alpha v0.1
BorkR is invite-only. You get in because someone already here vouched for you. That is a deliberate choice about what kind of room we are trying to run, and it costs us something. Here is the reasoning in full, so you can decide whether you agree with it.
The short answer
Someone already on BorkR vouches for you, and you are in.
If you do not know anyone here yet, come to something. Events are public and most of them do not ask whether you are a member. That is not a consolation prize, it is how a lot of people got here.
Nobody is permanently locked out. We are building ways in that do not run through your existing address book. Showing up in person is one, through events and the organisations already doing this work. People here being able to signal that they are open to vouching for someone they have met is another, so there is somewhere to knock. We are not putting dates on either, and neither exists yet.
The rest of this page is why we do it this way.
"It stops bots" is the wrong argument
You will see invite-only platforms claim a gate keeps the bad ones out. It does not, and anyone who has run a community knows it. Someone determined gets one account and works from there. If that were the whole case for doing this, a sceptic would take it apart in a minute, and they would be right to.
The reason is not prevention. It is accountability.
Every account traces back through real people
When you join, there is a thread running from your account back through whoever vouched for you, and back again from them. That thread does not stop anyone behaving badly. What it does is make bad behaviour traceable, and make it expensive. When something goes wrong we are pulling on a thread that leads somewhere, instead of looking at a throwaway email address and shrugging.
We want to be precise about what that does and does not mean. We lean on the chain, not on any single link in it. Being vouched for does not mean somebody knows you well, or has staked their reputation on how you behave. It means you did not arrive from nowhere. That is a smaller claim than most platforms make about their safety features, and it is one we can actually stand behind.
What that buys you
- Fewer scrapers. Profiles here belong to people for whom being outed carries a real cost: jobs, families, immigration status, physical safety. A population where every account cost a real person something is a worse target than an open directory.
- Fewer scams, less extortion. This community gets targeted specifically, because shame is the leverage. Accounts that lead back to someone are a bad instrument for that.
- Reputation that carries weight, because it is attached to people who can be found.
The trade, stated plainly
We are trading reach for safety. A smaller place, on purpose. That means slower growth, fewer people in your city on the day you arrive, and an app that will sometimes feel emptier than it should. We are not going to apologise for the choice, and we are not going to pretend it is free.
Who this shuts out
This is the part that deserves naming before anyone names it for us.
The person with no connections is very often the person who needs a place like this most. Newly out. Just moved. Isolated. Leaving something bad. And the scene has its own quiet exclusions, which do not disappear because somebody built an app: if you are not white, not cis, not able-bodied, not already somewhere near the middle of a local scene, then a network built on who already knows you is a network that has been unfair to you once already.
An invite system can reproduce every bit of that, faithfully. Saying we are aware of it changes nothing on its own, which is why the ways in at the top of this page matter more than this paragraph does.
We will come back to this
The strongest objection to everything above is that it reproduces the exclusions the scene already has. That objection is not settled by anything we write today. It is settled by who is actually here in a year. We intend to keep looking at that and to write about what we find, including if what we find is that this did not work.
Questions, or an argument: get in touch. The code of conduct and the safety page are the rest of how this place is meant to work.