emojis giving cozy web / convivial tool buidler vibes : 🫶🏼 🦫🥉 ☕️ 👯‍♀️🌱💝📍

what is the dinner party host equivalent on the internet? where would you go / what would you make if you wanted to gather people together in a place around a question or a theme

community software ftw

this thing on?

we stopped tweeting because we're taking some time to think about what kind of app and what kind of network we need, to keep in touch with our buidler friends in the ways that we most want to.

14/ that's what it feels like all our efforts are pointing toward.

13/ community radio as a north star for the kind of non-competitive game that we want to see exist (or make exist?) in social media. redefining "ambition" and "winning" as being about giving the best gifts.

12/ what would it look like for a broadcaster to be, not always a single person representing their own life and opinions, but a collective representing the overlap of what its constituents care about?

11/ what would it look like for a broadcaster to naturally have a limited range, and for that to be perfectly okay? to focus on how to best serve the specific area around them.

10/ it feels like our primary social media platforms today implicitly encourage the game in which each broadcaster tries to speak to the whole world and take over the whole world.

9/ independence as a badge of honor: "no one owns us."

8/ i imagine also that there might be a sort of pride in a station differentiating itself from the mainstream: "we play X because we can."

7/ which would require staying in touch with what its community needs and wants.

6/ i imagine that the ambition of a small community radio station is not to become the biggest or the only, but to become as relevant as possible *to its specific community*.

5/ one possible game in radio is to try to buy all the discrete stations, but this is not at all the only game that is played.

4/ and yet it's also decentralized because of other physics (a single station has limited geographical range).

3/ it's centralized and permissioned because of humans (central authority decides how the airwaves will be distributed and who gets to run a station);

2/ it's scarce because of physics (too many stations in the same place will interfere with each other, so there's a limited number of frequencies available);

1/ radio is a public good with properties that are interesting with respect to reimagining ways of doing social media:

we're hatching up some ideas inspired by Robin Sloan's Spring '83 protocol.. 🌚 https://t.co/pjmdlAecH9