Why we'll never raise the 8-person cap.

Three to eight. That's the size of a Fold. The lower bound is a sanity check, two people don't need an app to share a drill, they need a text message. The upper bound is the one people argue with us about.

The pitch we hear, almost weekly: "we'd love to use this for our whole apartment building." Or our extended family. Or our block. The answer is no, gently, and here's why.

Three things change past eight

We didn't pick the number from a Dunbar paper. We watched it happen. In every Fold past eight, three things shifted in roughly the same way.

• Someone in the Fold no longer recognizes everyone. Even if the founder of the Fold knows all eight, the eighth person joining doesn't necessarily know everyone else. Trust starts running through intermediaries, "she's a friend of Maya's," which is a different shape of trust than "she lives next door."
• The chat goes from a thread to a feed. At six people, everyone reads everything. At ten, people skim. The careful, low-volume signals we build, "Maya's drill is due back Sunday", drown in the scroll.
• Norms split. A four-person Fold has one set of unwritten rules. A twelve-person Fold has three. Half the group returns things spotless; half the group returns things with sawdust on them, and now there's a Reddit post about it.

The cap is the number where you can still text everyone in the Fold and expect a reply by tomorrow.

The pitch we keep saying no to

The most common counter-pitch goes: "couldn't you make the cap a soft suggestion, and let groups opt out?" Yes. We could. We won't, because the cap isn't just a number, it's a piece of design vocabulary the whole rest of the app rests on. The "Folds list" is short because Folds are short. The chat is a thread, not a feed, because Folds are small. The handoff ritual works in person because everyone in the Fold lives close enough to do that.

Raise the cap and all of those things have to bend. We've thought about it. The version of Fold In with a soft cap is just a worse version of the apps that already exist for big groups, and the world doesn't need another one of those.

What we do for the building case

For the "we want this for our whole apartment building" pitch: we think the right answer is multiple overlapping Folds, not one giant one. Six neighbors on the 4th floor. Another six who all have kids the same age. Another six who borrow tools. The same physical building, three Folds, none of them past the cap, each of them with its own working trust.

We don't make this easy yet. It's on the list. A "shared item" concept that lets one drill exist in two Folds without being duplicated is the obvious next step, and we'll get there. But we're going to get there by making the cap real, not by removing it.

· with care,
Maya