Group chats with fewer than five people are wonderful. People are authentic and conversation is substantive.

But in chats with more than 20 people, things get out of hand. The only way to share content is to broadcast it to everyone. (The real-life analogue is using a megaphone. How many of your ideas or experiences do you really want to shout from a stage?)

And so, as group chats gets larger, sharing becomes less appealing to most members, the central feed becomes less meaningful, and members stop looking at what’s being said. In a word: intimacy fades.

Is it possible for a large community forum to stay intimate? If we look to existing platforms—Reddit, Discord, Slack—the answer they give is: sort of. These platforms split big communities into smaller ones (servers, subreddits, channels). And these small communities are each more intimate. But the problem becomes finding the right ones assuming they even exists… a place where you want to share particular experiences and ideas, and where people share content you care about. The content you need: it’s buried in channels you’d never know to seek.

So maybe the only way for a large community to feel intimate is to split itself. That’s been the best solution, in physical and digital space, for ever. But the result is that most of us don’t find the communities where we feel most at home. Nor the individuals who have dealt with the problems we face, or could benefit from the wisdom we’ve gained.

I can’t count the number of stories I’ve encountered where individuals struggling with something - eg an illness - and only encountering the solution if they get lucky enough to stumble into the right person.

What would it take for large community forum to stay intimate w/o splitting into channels?

1. You’d need a more meaningful way to share than broadcasting to everyone in the group.
2. You’d need a more meaningful way to receive content than a chronological feed. Most posts in a chronological feed don’t apply to you. Finding the stuff that does apply takes time (which is good for advertisers and bad for everyone else).

It’d be a place where you could share content with the people who care about it, and a place where the only content you receive would be content you care about.

This exists in partial forms for short video (TikTok) and images (Pinterest). But how about for thoughts? For experiences? For text?

A community forum that prizes your thoughts over your attention, and helps you make progress rather than numb your mind, it’d have to look different. It’d have to give you space to express yourself. Helps you rather than entertains you.

You’d encounter a blank page, record what you’re thinking, and see, immediately, the most relevant thoughts from the rest of your peers.

That’s it — a portal that makes an immense online community as intimate as a small group chat.

That’s what we’re building :)