About
A small city for small software.
Why this exists
Good small software is hard to find. App stores reward scale, search results reward marketing budgets, and social feeds reward whatever is loud this week. Indie City is the opposite on purpose: a short, hand-picked list of independent apps and games that a human curator actually looked at, arranged as a city you can stroll instead of a feed you scroll.
The city is the interface, not the point. The point is a directory that stays small enough to trust.
City Cred
Every project gets a visible score out of 80, built from four parts:
- +10 Published listing, reviewed by a human curator
- +20 Official site listed and reachable at curation time
- +20 Public source code linked
- +30 Community cred at most, one per browser, +1 each
City Cred is never sold. There is no paid placement, no promoted listing, and no way to buy points.
City Cred is a community signal. It is not proof of quality, security, or ownership. A high score does not mean code was audited, and the official-site check does not prove who owns the project.
Honest limitations
This is an MVP. The current safeguards are simple:
- Community cred uses a random browser cookie plus a hashed server-side secret. Clearing cookies gives a fresh identity, so determined people can vote more than once.
- Vote and submission writes are rate-limited per network address, hashed before use and never stored as raw addresses.
- Official sites are checked by a human at curation time, not monitored continuously.
- Submissions sit in a private queue until a human publishes them. Nothing submitted appears automatically.
Roadmap, not shipped
Maker credits, written reviews, and ownership verification are ideas on the roadmap. They are not implemented today, and nothing on this site claims otherwise.
Contact and conduct
Submissions include a private contact email used only to discuss that submission. The directory collects no accounts, no analytics beacons, and no tracking pixels.