Contribute
A post only goes live once a GPS trail confirms you're really there, and that same presence lets you check in and, where a place has a chat, join it – with a full account, you can also set up a Spoty of your own on the map, free.
Only people who are there can post
A GPS trail has to confirm you're actually within that place's radius before spoty lets a post go live – which is exactly what keeps content real and spam not worth attempting.
Posting on spoty always starts with the same check. Before anything you write goes live, spoty confirms you're actually standing within that place's radius right now, using a GPS trail as the evidence – not your say-so, and not a box you get to tick yourself. That single requirement quietly kills spam before it can start: flooding a place with posts from your couch simply isn't possible, and travelling to every place you'd want to spam is far more effort than spam is ever worth, so most people never even try. It also means something for what does get published. A note about a museum exhibit came from someone standing in the gallery; a photo from an old stone bridge came from someone who was actually standing on it. None of it can be phoned in from somewhere else, however well you think you know the place from photos or from what someone else told you. One rule, applied the same way everywhere on the map, for every account old or new: be there, or don't post.
Check in and join the conversation
At cafés, bars, museums and anywhere else people gather, a check-in unlocks that place's own chat – open to whoever else is there with you right now.
Check in, and a place on spoty stops being something you only read – it becomes somewhere you're actually standing, at the same time as whoever else happens to be there. That's what a check-in unlocks: proof that you're on site right now, and with it, access to that place's own chat. None of it runs through a contact list or requires knowing each other first – standing in the same place at the same time is the entire premise, and the conversation belongs to that place, not to your contacts. Not every point on the map has one, and that is deliberate: the chat exists where people already gather and meeting a stranger is an ordinary thing – cafés and bars, restaurants, museums and theatres, cinemas, parks, squares, stadiums and venues, viewpoints. Schools and nurseries, hospitals and doctors' surgeries, churches and other places of worship are excluded outright, and so are transport stops; somewhere you have good reason not to be spoken to is somewhere there is no chat. So it might be someone in a museum pointing out the painting you'd have walked straight past, or a quick word with whoever's next to you in the queue for a food stall. A single visit stops being something you experience on your own, because whoever else happens to be there right now is part of it too.
Your own Spoty, free
Set up one Spoty of your own, free, with a full account – not a starting allowance, just yours.
With a full account you can set up a Spoty of your own – not followed, not just visited, but yours, the way no other place on the map is. You give it a name and a spot on the map, and it takes its place among the hundreds of thousands already there. That one is free: no paywall, no credit card, nothing to pay for it. One, specifically – not a starting allowance that grows later, but a fixed one per full account, the same for everyone. That number doesn't move, no matter how long you've had the account, how actively you use it, or how many other Spotys you've explored along the way. Browse anonymously and there's nothing on the map tied to you; setting one up is what a full account gets you, at no cost. A single place on the map that is unambiguously yours, sitting right alongside every other Spoty on it.
Explore
Follow
Welcome to spoty
Nothing to install – spoty runs straight in your browser, with the option to add it as an app when you want to. Sign in with Apple or an email address for an account, or stay fully anonymous, in any of eight languages.
Open spoty