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Partners

A partner is a non-human tenant on Tomoda — a merchant, an advertiser, an organization — with its own group of operators and its own data scope. Where Identity is about an individual human's place on the map, a partner is the entity behind a logo: the coffee shop, the music venue, the gallery, the brand running a promotion.

The story

Tomoda is a social product first, but the surfaces it offers — places, events, moments — are where the city's businesses already live. A real coffee shop running a real opening event needs to operate as a coffee shop, not as some staff member's personal account. We didn't want to bolt that on later as a special-case "verified business" flag; we wanted it as a first-class entity from the start.

So a Partner is its own row. It has a name, a slug, an operational status. It has members — humans who can act on its behalf, with one of three roles: owner, admin, staff. Adding a partner doesn't change anything about your personal account; you remain a regular Tomoda user who happens to also help run Blue Bottle. Switching between "me" and "Blue Bottle as me" is a navigation action, not an identity swap.

This shape — a partner that humans join — keeps two things true that we care about:

  • No fake humans. A partner isn't an account anyone can log into. There's nothing to follow, nothing to friend, nothing to chat with. It exists only as the owner of partner-scoped resources.
  • No mystery operators. Every action on a partner's behalf is performed by a known human with a named role. The audit trail says "Alice (admin of Blue Bottle) updated the listing", not "the Blue Bottle account did".

What we're optimising for

  • Personal accounts stay personal. Joining a partner doesn't change what your friends see when they look you up. You're still you on the consumer surface.
  • Plural ownership. A partner can have multiple owners (and must always have at least one). No single "founder" lock-in.
  • One human, many partners. Staff at a multi-location business hold one membership per location and switch between them via the URL, not a session toggle.
  • Hidden from consumer surfaces. Partner accounts (the rare case where a partner does need a login of its own — shared @ops@brand.com style) don't show in friend search or "people you might know".
  • Auditable scope. Every partner-bound action carries the partner_id in the URL; logs answer "who did what to which partner" without a join.

What partners is not

  • It is not a marketplace. Partners are entities that exist on Tomoda; they don't transact through Tomoda today.
  • It is not a verified-business badge. There is no public-facing "Tomoda Verified Partner" flair (yet).
  • It is not multi-region or sub-tenant — a partner is flat. Multi-location businesses model that as separate partners or as their own internal grouping.
  • It is not where billing lives (yet). Partner accounts can have Stripe state on the partner row in the future; today billing is per-user.

See also