beunblurred, bereal without the catch.

bereal had a clean trade: post your own daily snap, then you get to see everyone else's. the pitch was "authentic social media." the engineering choice that backed it was a private mobile api, signed with a moving target every few weeks.

beunblurred unbundled the trade. log in with your real bereal account, then view your friends' photos without the requirement to post one yourself. the api was the same one the official app used; the auth flow was the same. i was just being honest about what was being requested.

the part that mattered

the project's actual technical contribution was an open-source reference for the bereal api: endpoints, request signing, token refresh, the whole flow documented in the readme. the web app was a marketing surface for the docs more than anything else. people forked it.

at peak it had a hundred and eighty thousand weekly users. then bereal rotated their request signing in a way that broke every reverse-engineered client at once, including the official one for a few hours. i could have kept up. i decided not to.

why it sunset

bereal itself plateaued, and the social product that depended on it stopped being interesting at the same rate. the github repo is still there. people occasionally open issues. i occasionally close them with "the project is archived, sorry."