A Guide to Brosky

Brosky fills one empty seat in something you already do every week.

The thing you browse is not men. It is sessions — a standing appointment with an activity, a day, a time, a cadence, and one open seat. Five-a-side on Thursday at seven. The Tuesday lift. A Saturday trail. A weekly co-op night that happens nowhere on earth. You post the one you already run, or you take a seat in someone else's.

There is no swiping, no likes, no matches, no "who viewed you", and no grid of faces. You cannot open a man's profile until the two of you have committed to the same session. That is deliberate, and it is the main thing that makes Brosky not a dating app.

Friendship, if it happens, is what is left after week six. The app's job is much smaller: remember the week.

Open the app and choose one of three ways in:

• Email — with a password, or with a one-time sign-in code sent to your inbox.
• Sign in with Apple
• Sign in with Google

You will be asked for your date of birth. Brosky is 18+. The age check runs on our servers, not just in the app, so there is no way around it.

Then five short steps: your city, your activities, the times of week that work for you, your first session, and a photo. The fourth step is the important one — see Post your first session.

Choose between one and eight. They are grouped: Lift & train, Ball games, Miles, Outdoors, Table & screen, Build & ship, Make & fix, and Steady.

Every tag on the list passes one test: it can be a standing Tuesday at seven. That is why you will find Padel, Bouldering, Car wrenching, Poker and Meal-prep Sundays, and why you will not find "travel", "music" or "food". Those are things you are, not things that recur.

Steady is the row for the honest ones — early-riser accountability, sober social, quit smoking, study, physio and rehab, new in town, new dad. If that is why you are here, say so. It is the highest-recurrence row in the list.

Your activities decide what you see on the board. A session, though, carries exactly one activity — a session that is two things is a vague hang, and vague hangs do not recur.

You type your city. That is all the geography Brosky has.

Brosky never asks for your location. There is no GPS, no radius, no distance on anyone's profile, no map, and no "men near you". The app does not request the location permission at all, so there is nothing to grant and nothing to switch off.

A weekly fixture is anchored by a named place — "Vake pitch", "the gym on Rustaveli" — not by a radius, and men do not commute variably to the thing they do every week. A city string and a place label do everything discovery needs.

Your city is a filter you apply, never a gate applied to you. The board is worldwide by default; narrowing to your city is a choice you make. You can leave your city blank, and you can change it whenever you move.

Onboarding does not end with "start browsing". It ends with you putting a session up.

That is on purpose. If everyone consumed first, the board would be empty for everyone. Because the first thing every man does is post, there is something on it from day one — including in a city where you are the only person here.

The composer asks for: the activity, the day, the start time, weekly or fortnightly, where (or nowhere, for an online session), how it runs — chill or competitive — and one line of context. It prefills from the activities and times you just picked. It should take under a minute.

Your session is real whether or not anyone takes the seat. You were going anyway.

Home. It shows open seats on the activities you picked, soonest first, with your own live session pinned at the top.

It reads like a fixture list, not a feed. There is no infinite scroll — there are only so many seats open this week, and showing you the end of the list is honest.

Worldwide by default. Tap your city to narrow it, tap an activity chip to filter it. If nothing matches you exactly, the board shows the near misses — the adjacent day, the adjacent activity — before it shows you nothing.

Open a session and tap Claim seat. You get 140 characters to say why. Something like "I play left back, been out six months, need the run."

That is the whole application. There is no like, no message thread yet, no match animation. The host sees your first name, your photo, your activities and your 140 characters, and decides.

You need a photo on your account to claim a seat or to accept one. You do not need one to look at the board. You do not need a face to book a court; you do need one to meet a stranger.

You can withdraw a claim any time before it is accepted, and nobody is told.

When someone claims your seat you get a badge on Requests. Two buttons: Accept, Decline.

Accepting is the only thing in Brosky that opens a message thread. There is no inbox full of strangers, because a thread cannot exist until two men have agreed to be somewhere at the same time.

Declining costs nothing and says nothing about him. If several men claim the same seat, only the one you accept gets a thread.

Every session has its own link. Send it to the two lads from work who almost play football, and they can see the fixture — activity, day, time, city, your first name — before they install anything.

This is how most crews actually start. It is also how Brosky works in a city with six people in it.

If nothing on the board matches you yet, do not sit and refresh. Place a standing order: tell Brosky the activity and the window you want, and it pushes you the moment a matching seat opens.

It works the other way too. Post your session in a quiet city and you will be told the instant another man picks a compatible activity and time.

A crew is you and whoever took your seat. It exists from the moment you accept, and it has one thread and one session behind it.

The Crew tab lists your standing sessions: what is next, where, how many weeks you have kept, whether either of you has answered yet, and anything unread. It is not a generic inbox — every thread on it has a real fixture behind it.

Pinned above the messages in every crew thread is the session header: Thu 19:00 · Vake pitch · weekly, and two buttons — I'm in and Can't this week.

The header is the product. The messages are just logistics.

The day before, you both get one push: "Thursday 19:00, Vake pitch — you in?" If you have already tapped I'm in, it tells you it stands rather than asking again. If you have said you can't, you are not asked twice.

Saying you can't this week does not end anything. The fixture is still there next week.

Two hours after the session, you both get one tap: Did it happen? Yes / No.

Two yeses and the session rolls forward to next week on its own, the meet count goes up, and the streak advances. Nobody renegotiates, nobody rematches, nobody has to remember to book it again.

A no is not a failure — the host gets prompted to re-time it. After two misses in a row the seat goes back on the board and the crew keeps its thread.

This is the only moment the app touches the real world, and it is the only thing it really measures. You are never asked to rate another man. The record is whether you both turned up. Nothing else.

Your profile carries how many sessions you have kept and your current streak. It is the only number in Brosky.

It answers exactly one question for the man about to hand you a seat: will he actually turn up on Thursday?

It cannot be bought, boosted, or influenced by paying for anything, and there is no leaderboard. A number you earn on a pitch stops meaning anything the moment it is for sale.

Travelling, injured, or just done with it:

• Edit — change the time, the place or the context line. Your crew sees the new header.
• Pause — it comes off the board and stops sending reminders. Unpause when you are back.
• Close — it ends. Any open seat comes down.
• Pause everything — Settings has one switch that pauses every session you host.

Pausing is not quitting, and it is better than going quiet on a man who is expecting you.

Your first name, your city, your activities, how many sessions you have kept, your streak, whether you are verified, and your photo.

That is all of it. No age, no distance, no bio essay, no last-name, no follower count. A Brosky profile answers "will he turn up", not "do I fancy him", so the reliability record sits first and the photo sits last — it is there as proof you are a person, not as merchandise.

It is reachable only from a session you are both party to, or from a crew thread. Nobody can look you up, search for you, or find you in a list. There is no list.

Settings › Photos. Pick from your library and upload.

Every photo is screened automatically before it appears anywhere. Most are through in seconds. A borderline one is held for a human to look at, and you will see it as pending until then. See the photo rules for what will be rejected.

A photo is optional for browsing the board, and required to claim a seat or accept one.

Settings › Edit profile. You can change your city, your activities, the times of week that suit you, and your one line of context, whenever you like.

Changing your activities changes what is on your board immediately. Changing your times changes which standing orders match you.

The board catches a man who already has a routine. The Shout is for the rest of it.

You write down one thing you are carrying. It is delivered privately to up to five men who have been through the same thing — one at a time, not broadcast. Each of them sees your words and nothing else. Nobody else ever reads the replies. There is no wall, no reply chain, no archive, no score, and it is deleted for good after 72 hours.

Two things keep it from becoming a forum. Answering is earned: only men who have actually kept a session get called on. And it resolves into something real — you can offer the man who understood you a seat at an actual session, and names are exchanged only if he takes it.

Group forums for men go bad because of the audience, not because of the men. So there is no audience.

Two men tie on to one goal for twelve weeks. Once a day, one tap: Did you? Yes / No. You each see the other's answer and nothing else.

The rules that matter:

• A no costs nothing. Ever, in any combination, on any day. What frays the rope is silence — not a bad day.
• His answer is hidden until you have given yours. Otherwise you are matching him instead of answering for yourself.
• No chat inside the Rope. No note, no reason box, no emoji. If you want to talk you already have a thread.
• One live Rope at a time. A man with four ropes has none.
• Twelve weeks, then it ends and tells you what happened. Tying on again is a thing you both choose, not a thing that renews.
• No score anywhere but between the two of you. Not on your profile, not on a leaderboard, not in a notification.

The Rope is the one part of Brosky that works with two men, on day one, in a city with nobody else in it.

Sometimes you do not need a network. You need one specific man, once. Someone who has rebuilt a 70-series. A physio who won't upsell me. Work, anything — I got made redundant.

Write the ask and it travels down real relationships: to the men you have actually met, and to the men they have met. Two hops, then it stops.

What it refuses to be: there is no directory, no search box, no skills, no "open to work", and no profile of a man you have not met is ever shown to you. At the second hop your name is hidden — the only name on his screen is the man who handed it to him, and he has met that man.

Nobody is ever told he was ignored. Letting a handover stop is free and silent, which is the only way a man who cannot help will be honest about it. Nothing is scored and nothing is archived: after seven days the ask and every hand-off are deleted outright. What survives is the thread, if one got made.

Very little, on purpose. There is no "someone viewed you", no "your match expires", no reaction alerts, and nothing that exists to get you to open the app.

What you will get:

• The day before a session — "Thursday 19:00, Vake pitch — you in?" This is the one that matters.
• Someone claimed your seat, or your claim was accepted.
• A message in a crew thread.
• Did it happen? a couple of hours after a session.
• A standing order matched — a seat you asked to hear about opened.
• Your daily Rope ask, if you are tied on.

Session reminders are sent in a fixed window and are dropped rather than delivered late. A push at three in the morning is worse than no push.

Not getting them? See I am not getting notifications.