Friendship · The Philos blog

Making room: taking someone out of your heart, quietly

Suhail — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Go to You, open Your people, then Make room. People you haven't talked with lately are listed first.
The person isn't told. You stop seeing each other's posts and Moments, and your chats stay.
Nobody else moves in your heart, and you can undo it straight after.

Gardeners have a word for cutting back a plant that's doing fine: pruning. It looks like loss, but it's how the plant puts its strength into what's still growing.

Friendships have seasons too. The colleague you saw every day, the neighbour who moved away, the group from a course you finished. Nobody did anything wrong. Life just moved on. With 49 places, there will be a day you want one back for someone new, and Philos makes that quiet.

Why it's quiet

On most apps, unfriending is a small public event. The other person may notice, wonder and ask. That awkwardness keeps people holding on to connections they've outgrown, and their feeds fill up with people they no longer know.

On Philos, making room tells nobody anything. It's a decision about your own space, and it stays yours.

How to make room

Go to You and open Your people.
Tap Make room. Under it, Philos says what it does: remove people quietly to free a spot.
At the top you'll see Quiet for a while: people you haven't talked with lately, with when you last spoke. Only you see this.
Choose who to remove, then tap Remove quietly.

Your heart fills from the tip. Nobody moves when someone leaves.

A short note confirms how many places you have left, with Undo if you tapped too fast.

What changes for each of you

When you make room

They aren't told.
You stop seeing each other's posts and Moments.
Your chats stay, and so do any groups you're both in.
If they hadn't added you back yet, or hadn't joined Philos, their place is freed.
Nobody else in your heart moves. Their dot empties, and that's all.

Making room for someone new

Sometimes you only find out you're full when you try to add someone. Philos tells you your space is full and offers Make room, so you can choose who to swap without leaving the page. It's all or nothing: if anything goes wrong, nobody is removed and you can try again.

A kind way to think about it

Making room isn't a verdict on a person. It's a note to yourself about who you share your days with now. If a season comes back round, so can they.

Strong ties, weak ties: who belongs in your 49

Luca Daniel — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Weak ties, the people you see now and then, bring news, ideas and opportunities. In a famous 1973 study, people who found jobs through contacts mostly heard from people they saw only occasionally or rarely.
Strong ties, the few people closest to you, are who you lean on when life gets hard.
A good life needs both. Philos is built for your strong ties; your weak ties can live everywhere else.

When he was a young sociologist, Mark Granovetter asked professionals in a Boston suburb who had recently changed jobs a simple question: how did you find out about this one? Many had heard about it through someone they knew. That part wasn't surprising. The surprise was who.

Mostly, it wasn't their best friends. Of the people who found their job through a contact, only 16.7% saw that person often. 55.6% saw them occasionally, and 27.8% rarely: an old colleague, a friend of a friend, someone from a previous job. In 1973 he published the result under a title that sounds like a riddle: "The Strength of Weak Ties".

Why acquaintances bring the news

Granovetter's explanation is elegant. Your close friends know the same people you know and hear the same things you hear. Your acquaintances move in other circles, so they're the ones who carry something new into your life: a job, a flat, a recommendation, an idea.

Think of it as the difference between a net and a rope.

Weak ties are a net. Wide, loose and cast far. They catch opportunities you'd never have seen.
Strong ties are a rope. Short, strong and close at hand. They're what you hold when you fall.

You need both, and they do different jobs.

Even small hellos matter

Weak ties aren't only useful. They make us feel better too. In a study published in 2014, the psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn stopped people on their way into a Starbucks in Vancouver. Some were asked to be as efficient as possible. Others were asked to smile, make eye contact and have a short chat with the barista.

The chatty group came out in a better mood, and feeling more like they belonged. A brief chat with a stranger did that.

So say hello to the man at the market stall. Keep chatting to the parents at the school gate. That web of light connections makes a neighbourhood feel like home.

What the rope is for

But nobody calls the barista from a hospital waiting room. When your marriage is wobbling, when the scan results come in, when you get the job and want to scream, there are a handful of people you reach for. Researchers call them your strong ties. You'd probably call them your people.

Those relationships take the most time to build and the most attention to keep. They're also the ones the modern internet serves worst. Feeds are built for reach, so your sister's news sits between an acquaintance's holiday and a stranger's opinion, and gets the same tiny moment of your attention.

Why Philos is built for the rope

Philos has room for 49 people because it's built for strong ties. It's the rope, not the net. There are no followers, no friends of friends and no suggestions of people you might know. Every place is someone you'd want to hear from first.

That doesn't mean your weak ties don't matter. Keep them, everywhere else: at work, in your street, on the apps built for reach. Philos is the room for the people you'd call at three in the morning.

Before you add your next person, try a quick test: if something went wrong tonight, would I want them to know? If the answer is yes, they belong in your 49.

The moai: Okinawa's circles of friends for life

Luca Daniel — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

A moai is a small group in Okinawa that meets regularly for years, often for life. It began as a shared fund that members paid into and drew from.
Some Okinawans belong to several, and researchers have met women in their eighties who've been in the same moai since primary school.
Europe has its own versions, like the Stammtisch and the tertulia. All you need is a few people and a date that repeats.

In the village of Ogimi, in the north of Okinawa, a local district head called Takashi Inafuku belongs to two groups of friends. One is the friends he went to school with. The other is the people he used to work with. Each group meets regularly.

That's not unusual there. A researcher from the Okinawa Centenarian Study told National Geographic he knows one man in Ogimi who belongs to seven.

These groups are called moai, and they may be one of the best friendship habits in the world to borrow.

It began as a shared purse

The moai didn't start as a social club. It started as money.

The first written record comes from an Okinawan chronicle in 1733, which mentions moai set up to help struggling families. Members paid into a shared fund, and each took a turn drawing from it when they needed it. Before money was common, people pooled what they had: rice, sugar, goats, even tofu.

Over time, the money mattered less and the meeting mattered more. Today most moai are mainly social: a group of friends who meet, eat, talk and look out for each other, month after month.

A savings account of people

The moai's origin is the best way to understand it.

Everyone pays in regularly. Not money now, but time: the monthly lunch, the walk, the evening of cards.
The pool grows. Every meeting adds trust, history and in-jokes.
Anyone can draw on it. When someone's ill, widowed or out of work, the group already knows, and already shows up.

You can't open that account on the day you need it. It only works because people paid in when nothing was wrong.

Friends since primary school

The most striking moai are the oldest. The same National Geographic report describes women in their eighties who had belonged to the same moai since primary school. Dan Buettner's Blue Zones project, which made the moai famous outside Japan, says some have lasted more than 90 years.

Okinawa is known for long lives, and the moai is often given part of the credit. We can't prove that from the outside, and many things shape a long life. But the wider research is clear on one thing: people with strong social relationships are more likely to live longer. A major review of 148 studies found a 50% greater likelihood of survival.

Europe has moai too

You don't have to go to Okinawa to find one. Europe has its own versions, even if we rarely call them anything.

The German Stammtisch, the regulars' table at the local pub, kept for the same group on the same night every week.
The Spanish tertulia, a regular gathering of friends to talk, often in the same café.
The Sunday lunch that never moves, the five-a-side game every Thursday, the book group that stopped reading years ago but still meets.

What they share with the moai is the important part: the same people, on a date that repeats, kept even when it's inconvenient.

How to start yours

Choose four or five people. Small enough that everyone talks, and that one absence is noticed.
Pick a date that repeats. The first Sunday of the month. Every other Thursday. Make it automatic, so nobody has to organise it each time.
Keep it simple. A walk, a meal, a coffee. The point is turning up, not the plan.
Show up when it's hard. That's when the account gets paid in most.

On Philos, a moai can live in two places. A group chat for the group itself, where you can plan the next meeting with a poll. And a Circle, a private list only you can see, so you can share photos from the day with just those people.

Who would be in yours? Message them tonight, and put the first date in the calendar.

Why a short message means more than you think

Luca Daniel — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

In experiments with more than 5,900 people, those who reached out to someone they'd lost touch with underestimated how much it was appreciated.
The more unexpected the message, the bigger the gap between what senders expected and how recipients felt.
A two-line message, a photo or a voice note is enough. The hard part is sending it.

Picture the doormat after a week away. Bills, a takeaway menu, a letter from the bank. And, somewhere in the pile, a postcard with your name in handwriting you recognise.

You read the postcard first. You read it twice. It probably says almost nothing: the weather, a joke, "thinking of you". It's still the best thing in the pile.

Most of us would love to get that postcard. Far fewer of us send one. Why?

The message we never send

You know the feeling. You think of an old friend, and you almost write. Then the doubts arrive. It's been too long. They're busy. It'll be awkward. They might wonder why now.

So the message stays unsent, and the silence gets a little longer, which makes the next attempt feel even stranger.

What happens when people press send

In 2022, a team of researchers led by Peggy Liu at the University of Pittsburgh put those doubts to the test. Across a series of experiments with more than 5,900 people, they asked participants to reach out to someone in their social circle they hadn't been in touch with for a while: a short note, sometimes with a small gift.

Before sending, people predicted how much the other person would appreciate it. Then the researchers asked the people who received the messages how they felt.

The result was the same again and again. Senders underestimated how much their message was appreciated. In Liu's words, people "appreciate being reached out to more than people think".

The surprise is the gift

The most interesting finding is what made the gap bigger: surprise. The more unexpected the message, the further off the senders' predictions were. Recipients paid more attention to the surprise of hearing from someone than senders did. Reaching out to someone you weren't close to, or hadn't spoken to in a while, was appreciated even more than people guessed.

That turns the usual logic on its head. The thing that stops us, "it's been too long", is the thing that makes the message land.

It's the postcard on the doormat again. A postcard from someone you see every day would be nice. A postcard from someone you haven't heard from in two years is an event.

Thank-you notes work the same way

It isn't only reaching out. In an earlier study, the psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked people to write a short letter of thanks to someone who had mattered to them. The writers expected the recipient to feel a bit awkward. In fact, recipients felt more positive and more surprised than writers predicted, and much less awkward.

The same researchers later found that hearing a voice builds a closer bond than reading text, with no extra awkwardness. If writing feels stiff, send a voice message instead.

What to send

The research is clear on one thing: you don't need the perfect message. Something small and specific works.

A memory. "Drove past our old school today. Remember the bike shed?"
A photo. The café you used to go to, the song on the radio, the dog that looks like theirs.
A thank-you. "I never told you how much that weekend helped. It did."
Just hello. "Thought of you today. How are you?"

No need to explain why now. The surprise is part of the gift.

Where Philos fits

Philos is built for exactly these small moments. Your people are in one place, so the friend you've been meaning to message is a tap away. Replies to a Moment go straight into a private chat. And a voice note takes less time than typing an apology for the silence.

Before you put your phone down, think of one person you'd be glad to hear from. Then send them the postcard.

Voice messages: when typing won't do

Suhail — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Hold the mic to record and let go to send. Slide up to keep recording hands-free, or left to cancel.
Once locked, you can pause, listen back and decide before anything is sent.
Research suggests a voice builds a closer connection than text, without the awkwardness people expect.

Your hands are covered in flour. The pasta dough is finally right, and you want to tell your sister, who taught you, before it dries. You're not typing that out.

That's what voice messages are for. On Philos you hold one button, talk and let go.

Why a voice lands differently

In a 2021 study, the psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked people to reconnect with an old friend, either by phone or by email. Before the call, people expected talking to be more awkward than writing. Afterwards, it wasn't. Across their studies, conversations that included a voice created stronger bonds than text did, with no extra awkwardness.

A voice carries what text loses: the laugh halfway through a sentence, the pause before the hard part. When your mum hears you say "I'm fine", she can tell whether you are.

Send one in three moves

In any chat, hold the mic next to the message field and talk.
Let go to send.
Changed your mind? Slide left to cancel before you let go.

While you record, the other person sees that you're recording a voice note, so they know something is on its way.

Hands-free: lock, pause, listen back

For anything longer, slide up to lock. Now you can put the phone down and keep talking.

Locked, you can pause, and paused, you can listen back before you decide. Philos reminds you who will hear it: only the person you're talking to, or only the group. Then send it, keep recording, or delete it.

Groups work the same way: only the people in the group can hear it.

Listening

Tap a voice message to play it. Change the speed if someone talks the way they drive, and keep moving around the app: it plays on, with a small bar to pause or stop it, and you'll see it on your Lock Screen too.

Good to know

A voice message can be up to 15 minutes long.
Nothing on Philos can be forwarded, voice messages included.
If the microphone is off for Philos, you can still type, and allow it later in Settings.

When to send a voice instead of text

When it's longer than three lines.
When the tone matters more than the words: an apology, a congratulations, a "how did it go?"
When the person on the other end finds typing hard.

Lonely, with hundreds of followers

Luca Daniel — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

In the EU's first loneliness survey, 13% of people felt lonely most or all of the time, and young people were the loneliest.
Large studies link strong social ties with a markedly better chance of survival. Followers don't count; close relationships do.
Friendships are built with time and conversation. Swap one scroll this week for one message or call.

In January 2018, Britain did something no government had done before. It gave loneliness a minister.

Tracey Crouch, already the minister for sport, was asked to lead a plan across government after a cross-party commission set up in memory of the MP Jo Cox. The job title made headlines around the world. Then the numbers came in from everywhere else.

A lonely continent, and a surprising group

In 2022, the European Commission ran the first EU-wide survey of loneliness, asking more than 25,000 people in all 27 countries how they felt. About 13% said they'd felt lonely most or all of the time over the past four weeks. Another 35% said at least some of the time.

The loneliest weren't who you might expect. Not the oldest, on their own in a flat. Young people reported more loneliness than older generations. Ireland had the highest rate, above 20%. The Netherlands, Czechia, Croatia and Austria had the lowest, all under 10%.

Elsewhere, the pattern is the same. In 2023, the US Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic. In 2025, the World Health Organization estimated that one in six people worldwide are affected.

So here's the puzzle. We've never had more ways to reach each other, and the generation that grew up online reports the most loneliness. How?

Crisps for dinner

Think about the difference between a bag of crisps and a proper Sunday lunch.

Crisps are always there, fast and tasty. You can eat the whole bag without noticing, and an hour later you're hungry again.
Sunday lunch takes time to make, and you can't have it every hour. But you get up from the table full, and the people around it are why you remember it.

A feed of followers is the crisps. It's always there, it's quick, and it fills the time. Likes and views feel like company in the moment, but they don't feed the part of us that needs to be known.

Close relationships are the Sunday lunch. They're slower, and they can't be scaled to hundreds. But they're what nourishes us.

What nourishment looks like in the data

This isn't just a metaphor. In 2010, a team led by the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad pulled together 148 studies, covering more than 300,000 people followed for an average of seven and a half years. People with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over that time.

The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory put it even more starkly: the effect of being socially disconnected on mortality is similar to that of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

None of those studies counted followers. They counted things like whether you have people to rely on, how often you see them, and how woven into each other's lives you are.

Friendships are made of hours

There's no shortcut to that kind of relationship. In a 2018 study, the communication researcher Jeffrey Hall estimated that it takes around 50 hours together to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, around 90 to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends. Time spent together by choice counted most.

That's the hidden cost of the feed. The hours we spend scrolling past hundreds of people are hours we don't spend with the few who could become, or stay, the people we lean on.

We underestimate each other

The good news is that the other person is usually keener than we think. In a 2014 study, the psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters in Chicago to strike up a conversation with a stranger on their train or bus. Other people, asked beforehand, predicted that talking would make the commute worse. Instead, those who talked had a more pleasant commute than those who sat in silence. We assume others don't want to talk. Mostly, they do.

If that's true of strangers, it's even more true of the friend you haven't messaged since spring.

What Philos is for

We built Philos as the Sunday lunch, not the crisps. Room for 49 people, so every place is someone you know. A Home that ends, so you put the phone down when you've caught up. Chats and voice messages for the conversations that turn hours into friendship.

This week, try one swap. The next time you reach for a feed out of habit, send a message to someone you'd love to see instead. Two lines is enough.

What 88 years of the Harvard happiness study found

Luca Daniel — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed 724 men, and later their families, since 1938. It's one of the longest studies of adult life ever run.
Its clearest finding is that warm, close relationships keep people happier and healthier.
Relationships need upkeep, like fitness. Small, regular contact with your people is the exercise.

In 1938, researchers at Harvard started following 268 young men, students in their second year, to find out what helps people thrive. Nobody expected the study to outlive most of the people who began it.

It's still running. Over the decades, the researchers checked medical records, drew blood, scanned brains, talked to their children and filmed them talking with their wives about what worried them most.

In 2015, the study's director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, gave a TEDx talk about what all of it had taught them. Millions of people have watched it since. His answer fit in one line: "Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period."

Two groups, one finding

Today the study follows two groups from different worlds. One is those Harvard students. The other is 456 men who grew up in some of Boston's poorest neighbourhoods, first studied by a separate team and later brought into the Harvard study.

Their lives went everywhere. Some became factory workers, some doctors and lawyers, and one became President of the United States. Some struggled with alcohol, a few with serious mental illness.

Across both groups, the clearest message wasn't about wealth, fame or working harder. It was about relationships. The men who were most satisfied in their relationships at 50 were, on average, the healthiest at 80.

What "good relationships" means

Waldinger is careful about the word "good". The study didn't find that people with the most friends did best. In his talk he describes three lessons:

Connection helps. People more connected to family, friends and community were happier and healthier, and lived longer.
Loneliness hurts. People more isolated than they wanted to be were less happy, their health declined earlier in midlife, and their brains declined sooner.
Quality beats quantity. You can be lonely in a crowd or in a marriage. In his words, "it's the quality of your close relationships that matters".

Relationships are a kind of fitness

In 2023, Waldinger and his colleague Marc Schulz wrote a book about the study, The Good Life. In interviews about it, Waldinger talks about social fitness: like physical fitness, it's a practice, not a one-off. Relationships fade without attention, and nobody stays fit from one big workout a year.

That changes what keeping in touch means. It isn't a chore or a nice extra. The two-line message on a Tuesday, the voice note on the way home, the photo of the dinner you cooked with your grandmother's recipe: those are the reps.

What it means for the apps we use

If relationships are the exercise, most social apps are a gym full of mirrors. They're built to show yourself to as many people as possible, not to keep up with the few who matter.

We built Philos the other way round: room for 49 people, a Home that ends when you've caught up, and Chats for the conversations that keep a relationship warm. Philos can't do the reps for you, but it's a good place to do them.

So here's this week's exercise, straight from the study: pick one relationship that matters and has gone quiet. Send something small today.

The Christmas card list behind Dunbar's number

Luca Daniel — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Robin Dunbar predicted that people keep up about 150 meaningful relationships. A study of 2,984 Christmas cards found an average of 153.5.
Those relationships sit in rings of roughly 5, 15, 50 and 150, each about three times the size of the one inside it.
The inner rings need time and contact to stay close. Philos's 49 places sit at the ring Dunbar calls good friends.

Every December, millions of people sit at a kitchen table with a pile of cards and a list. Who gets one this year? Who got one last year and didn't send one back? Who has moved, married or quietly drifted away?

That list turned out to be a scientific instrument.

A number from the monkey cages

In the early 1990s, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar was studying monkeys and apes. He noticed that species with a bigger neocortex, the thinking part of the brain, lived in bigger groups. Keeping track of who is friends with whom, who groomed whom and who owes whom a favour takes brainpower.

In 1993 he extended the line to humans. The size of our brains predicted a group of about 148 people: roughly how many relationships, he argued, we can keep up at once. Not names we recognise, but people we'd know, and know how they fit into our lives.

Counting Christmas cards

A number from primate brains needs testing on people, and Christmas cards turned out to be a good test. A card costs a little time, a little money and a stamp, so people mostly send them to relationships they care about.

Dunbar and his colleague Russell Hill gave questionnaires to households in Britain while they wrote their cards. For every card, people noted who it was for, how close they felt and when they were last in touch. They also listed everyone living in each household the card went to.

Forty-three households sent 2,984 cards between them, about 68 each. Counting everyone in the homes those cards reached, the average network came to 153.5 people, close to what the brains had predicted.

Not one circle, but rings

The more interesting finding came later, as Dunbar and others looked at how those relationships are arranged. They aren't one flat crowd. They form rings, each about three times the size of the one inside it. In Dunbar's own plain words:

About 5: intimate friends, the people you'd turn to in a crisis.
About 15: best friends.
About 50: good friends.
About 150: friends.

Think of the seating plan at a wedding. The top table is your five. The tables nearest the front are your fifteen. Everyone at the dinner is your fifty. And the evening party, when the dancing starts and the plus-ones arrive, is your hundred and fifty.

It's a shape, not a rule

Dunbar's number is a tendency, not a law. Dunbar himself describes 150 as a range, roughly 100 to 250, and some people have far more connections or far fewer. Other researchers argue the primate data can't produce one precise number at all. What has held up well is the shape: a small, close centre and wider, looser rings around it.

The inner rings need tending

The rings also behave differently. In an 18-month study, Sam Roberts and Dunbar followed students as they left home for university. When contact dropped, closeness to friends fell faster than closeness to family. Friendships, they concluded, cost more to keep.

That's the trouble with feeds that treat every connection the same. When your best friend's news and an acquaintance's holiday get the same tiny moment of your attention, the inner rings get less than they need.

Where 49 fits

Philos gives you 49 places, which sits at the ring Dunbar calls good friends: roughly everyone at the wedding dinner. It's a heart that fills one place at a time, so the first five are yours to choose, then the next ten, then the rest.

This week, try a small exercise. Write down the five people in your innermost ring. Then ask: when did I last talk properly with each of them? If the answer is "too long ago", you know who to message first.

Who to add first: your first five places

Suhail — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In short

Start with the four or five people you'd call first with good news or bad. Everyone else can come later.
Add people who are already on Philos, invite the rest with a note in your own words, or scan each other's code in person.
You see each other's posts and Moments only once both of you have added each other. Philos never nudges anyone.

Picture moving house. You don't email the whole street to help carry the sofa. You call the four or five people who will turn up, bring snacks and stay to eat them.

Your first places on Philos work the same way. Your heart has room for 49, and it's tempting to fill it fast. Don't. Start with the people who'd turn up.

The sofa test

Ask yourself one question: who would I call first, with good news or bad?

For most of us the answer is a short list. A partner, a parent, a sibling, one or two friends who've known us forever. Researchers who study friendship keep finding this same small inner circle: about five people we lean on most, inside a wider ring of close friends. We wrote about where those numbers come from.

Those are your first five. Add them first, and Philos feels like home from the first day, because the first things you see are from the people you care about most.

Save each place for someone who'd save you one in theirs.

Add the people who are already here

In Chats, tap + and choose Invite someone.
Under From your contacts, anyone already on Philos shows On Philos. Tap Add.
You'll see Added · waiting for them. Once they add you back, you're in each other's space.

Philos checks coded versions of phone numbers to find who's here, never names, and doesn't keep them. Only the people you add are saved.

Invite the people who aren't here yet

For someone who isn't on Philos yet, tap Invite. Their place is saved, and you send them a personal note. Philos starts you with this one:

Hey! I'm moving the people I'm closest to somewhere private. No ads, no followers, just us. I'd love you to be there.

Change it to sound like you. "Mum, this is where the kids' photos will go from now on" lands better than any note we could write. Invites go out as a message from your phone, so they come from you, not from an app. Nobody is messaged automatically.

Sent means it left your phone, not that they've seen it. Nothing is sent again by itself.

Together right now? Scan each other

If you're at the same table, it's quicker in person. In Invite someone, one of you taps Show your code and the other taps Scan their code. Nothing you share is seen until you've both added each other.

You can also send your link from Share your link. Anyone with it can find you on Philos, and a stranger who opens it sees only your name and photo.

Then let it grow

After the first five, add the people you talk to every week or two. The rest of your places can wait for the friend you reconnect with next summer, or the cousin who finally gets an iPhone.

Good to know

You see each other's posts and Moments only when you've both added each other.
If someone doesn't add you back, nothing happens. Philos never nudges anyone.
Places aren't forever. You can make room later, and nobody is told.