Why We're Building Small
The name is the spec. Three words, three commitments.
Me — a profile that's actually you. Not a brand surface, not a highlight reel tuned for an audience of strangers, not a growth funnel with your face on it. A page that reads like the person your friends already know.
Us — a handful of people you chose. Not followers, not an audience, not a graph of parasocial half-strangers accumulated over a decade. The people you'd text. The people who'd notice if you went quiet.
Now — what's happening, not what's trending. What your people are doing today, in the order it happened, not what an engagement model decided would keep you scrolling at 1 a.m.
That's it. That's the whole product. And we're building it in the open, so let's be honest about the state of things: this is a rebuild in progress. Some of what we describe on this blog exists, some of it is half-wired, some of it is a sketch on the bench. When it's the third kind, we'll say so.
Small by design is an engineering constraint
Here's the part people find strange: small isn't a stage we're passing through on the way to big. It's the constraint the whole design hangs on.
Big platforms have to optimize for scale, because scale is the business. Scale means engagement-minutes, engagement-minutes mean ranking algorithms, ranking algorithms mean the loudest post wins. None of that is malice. It's just what the math does when the goal is more.
So we deleted the goal. No growth loops — nothing in the product exists to make you invite people, and nothing rewards you for it. No follower counts as status — there is no number under your name telling you and everyone else how much you matter. No leaderboard energy anywhere. When you remove those, a strange thing happens: most of the hard problems of social media get radically easier, because most of them are problems of scale. Moderation, context collapse, virality, spam — these are what a firehose does. A dinner table mostly doesn't have them.
Thirty-eight people
A social site for 38 people sounds like a punchline. Every instinct the industry has trained into us says that's a failure to launch — where's the hockey stick?
But think about your actual life. How many people do you genuinely want to hear from every day? Not could tolerate. Want. For most people the honest number is smaller than 40. The big platforms know this too; they just can't act on it, because their economics need your number to be 4,000.
Ours doesn't. A network of 38 people who actually show up for each other isn't a small version of a big thing. It's a different thing — closer to a group chat with a memory, or a dinner table with a door.
We're building the table. Pull up a chair, or just watch us work. Either way, we'll keep the notes coming.