Small group chats can be wonderful. Conversation is authentic, connections are based in substance, and members share personal context.

But group chats with more than 10 people can get out of hand. A central feed becomes overwhelming and mostly irrelevant; sharing turns into broadcasting; and most members neither engage nor contribute. In a word: intimacy fades.

Is it possible for an online community forum to stay intimate as it grows? I’m not aware of any examples. It’d require:

• a more meaningful way to receive content (than through a chronological feed).
• a more meaningful way to share content (than by broadcasting with everyone in the group).

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

Picture a social network without a feed: a place where you can record an idea or problem, have it distributed to all and only the individuals who would benefit, and see, immediately, the most relevant thoughts from your peers.

This kind of connection-making portal would make a few things possible:

1. Meaningful large communities - centered around health, relationships, and work – could actually live on the internet. The kind of substantive connections between people who deal with overlapping problems—which in the status quo occur rarely—would occur routinely.
2. People would have a place to put vulnerable experiences and ideas - the sort that you want to share but don’t want to broadcast to everyone you know. (Most thoughts are “vulnerable thoughts”). This new mode of sharing may be a departure from “posting” as great as double-blind matching (Tinder) was a departure from IRL dating.
3. Online community would feel more, not less, intimate as it grew. People would have more other thoughts and peers to connect to.

Up until this decade, the requisite connection-making technology didn’t exist. And traditionally, a venture-backed startup wouldn’t be set up to focus on high-impact communities nor earn their trust.

At Plexus — a venture-backed public benefit corporation, harnessing state-of-art connection-making technology — we’re making this portal. A shared brain for online communities.

Let’s see how we do.

(A first step in Inverting the Internet).

Scaling Intimacy (1)

A More Precise Way To Share