The AIM buddy list without the messenger.
Hereandaway is a narrow sidebar for your desktop that shows which of your friends are at their computers right now. Each person is here, away with a note they left, or simply a name. They can attach a short message to either state, in a color and a font they chose.
That is the entire product. Names and sentences.
Why
Presence used to carry information. A green dot meant someone sat down at a computer, which was a real event. Now everything is online all the time, so presence software drifted into surveillance: last-seen timestamps, typing indicators, “active 3m ago,” automatic activity reporting. Same primitive, opposite feeling.
Hereandaway rebuilds the good version by removing everything that turns presence into a record.
What it refuses to do
- No history, ever.
- Presence is a live value in the server’s memory. It is never written to disk, never logged, never queryable. There is no record of who was online when — not for you, not for us, not for anyone who asks us.
- No last-seen, in any form.
- No timestamps, no “active 14m ago,” no sorting by recency. Absence with a number reads as a verdict. Absence here just reads as “not right now.”
- No inferred metadata.
- No now-playing, no current app, no location, no device type, no typing indicator. If someone wants you to know what they’re up to, they type it.
- No chat.
- No messages between people, so no message history, no read receipts, no pressure to respond. It’s a buddy list, full stop.
- No strangers.
- No search, no directory, no public profiles. The only way onto someone’s list is a single-use invite code they made for you and handed over themselves.
- No analytics, no telemetry.
- The app phones home about nothing. Neither does this website — no cookies, no scripts, nothing.
The long version of these promises is the privacy page. It’s short too.
Get it
Desktop only, on purpose — the whole signal is “at a computer.”
Details and versions on the downloads page.