It’s been a little while since I last wrote. My brother and I moved states to spend a few months with our parents. Later this year he and I plan to spend a year doing the digital nomad thing in Europe. Broaden our horizons a bit.
In my spare time I’ve been building a new side project, wiblet.net, mostly motivated by the coming trip. I refuse to use Twitter or any product owned by Meta. Which means keeping up with friends who aren’t nearby can be difficult.
I’ve been trying to think about what would make a good social network, one that I wouldn’t feel bad about using.
- It wouldn’t have algorithmic feeds.
- It would only encourage interaction between actual friends, not distant strangers.
- Everything would be private by default.
- It wouldn’t encourage attention-maxing with likes or shares.
- It would encourage non-verbal, creative self-expression.
- It wouldn’t push non-consensual exposure to potentially-triggering topics such as politics and religion.
- It would encourage active (if bite-sized) interaction with friends, rather than passive consumption of acquaintances’ lives.
Wiblet.net is my first experiment exploring what that might look like. I was hoping it would be something like a mix of GeoCities, MySpace, and Myst. A place where friends could collaborate on shared worlds to explore and interact in. What it’s turned out to be so far is a social scrapbook. So maybe not quite what I was going for.
On other possible approaches, I’ve been thinking about an idea I’m calling micro-attentions, and what a social network built around them might look like. Basically the idea being a platform that takes the Facebook poke and runs with it. Smile, hug, high-five, surveys (back to BuzzFeed?) or just simple shared questions, sharing a photo or a drawing, etc. Each micro-attention would be shared between only two people. And somehow these interactions would be encouraged through gamification or statistics or shared play or creativity. Maybe growing a garden or a forest where each plant represents a connection being strengthened. Something to make using the product feel satisfying and meaningful.
I don’t know, I’m still mulling.