Towards Small-Scale Social

What do we need, and what do we only reach for out of habit? What exhausts, and what nourishes?

Social environments on the internet provide a bountiful — and sometimes incongruous — bundle: conversation, riffing, jokes and shitposts, entertainment, learning, distraction, inspiration, meeting interesting people.

It's a beautiful bundle, to be sure! It's also fragile, and chaotic, and becoming increasingly clear that no platform can sustainably deliver all that we need. And the priorities of the biggest social media platforms are very different from the parts that actually benefit our lives.

Maybe it always has been, but the present vibes feel particularly precarious. This is destabilizing, but also primes us for what comes next. Twitter clones abound; fragmentation is expected; love and hate relationships are the norm.

We think we want better chat, better blogs, better Twitter, better Discord…but it's hard to articulate what this means. When we think about these platforms at their best: they're about connection, meaning, friends, sparks of delight and provocations and resonance.

These days many of the best online social experiences happen in very small-scale environments. A few friends, a loose microcommunity, a cozy corner with the right vibes.

It's in the air, thick with it, even, in certain places — the cozyweb, the indieweb, the slow web; tiny internets and run your own social; independent creative communities, local learning spaces, small schools and squads…and beyond.

Mapping What Matters

What are the parts of this that actually matter? Social goals are different for everyone, but the things we value and find most energy in include:

• activity that nurtures long-term values: doing things that you'll care about tomorrow, next week, next year; using technology intentionally, as a means of deepening relationships

• DIY social graphs: real updates from real friends; ways to connect and reconnect, on and offline, around shared work and play

• creative agency and intentionality: emergent creative experiments; choosing how to spend time

• intimacy and shared resonance: third spaces, cozy cafes, intriguing corners of the library

Conversely, there are some things we don't want, because we know they're at odds with the above! If we're moving towards small-scale social, we're pushing back against:

• algorithm-driven friend-making: where the people and ideas we encounter are subject to inscrutable and changing whims
• monolithic platform control: where a few mega-corps make the rules and draw the maps
• internet as universal background noise: a landscape full of inescapable ads, discourse, and other distractions we didn't ask for

Give us group chats, but with purpose — where we can focus energy towards meaningful collaboration, meetings of minds. This is hard, because it's way easier to browse and scroll — so we need a lot of activation energy, lower friction for creative experiments.

Give us online social environments that are non-algorithmic, purpose-driven, intimate, and intentional — grounded in simple acts of being and doing things with friends, yet with space for serendipity, room for emergent social pathways to wend their way from loose ties to collaborative circles.

Give us places with edges, boundaries, doors and walls — with legible changes, finite and countable updates. Where we can explore cool projects with people we know, and start new things together.

Shared Society of Small-Scale Social

We're not the only ones who want this. There are a number of others doing great work on small-scale social internet experiences, platforms, and tools:

• Arena: small-scale social around curation + collection
• Futureland: small-scale social around habits + journaling
• Kinopio: small-scale social around mind-maps and shared idea-space
• Sprout: small-scale social around shared virtual presence
• mmm.page: small-scale social around websites-as-creative-canvas

And of course, individuals wield the tools available every day to create beautiful shared spaces for friends — surfing and subverting platform norms, carving paths, setting examples — making things work, somehow, through sheer force of will:

• Small circles hosting creative challenges on Instagram
• Prosocial conversational stewardship on Twitter
• Book clubs emerging from DMs
• Tiny Discords, carefully configured, for friends to hang together
• Personal websites in Google Docs; parties in Google Sheets

We're happy to be a part of this ecosystem…

…and we also want to figure out ways to play together……to weave together these different kinds of spaces, this whole set of tools, this library of experiences and ways of exploring and…and………and…………

Network Topology of the Small-Scale Socialverse

Just for fun, and for the sake of illustration, let's map a small corner of this interconnected web — people and projects and social clusters, which might manifest as Spaces and Studios on Hyperlink, but are interesting and worth following no matter where they live!

We drew a smaller snapshot for our post about the initial version of Studios — a map of learning and projects for the three of us on the Hyperlink Team.

Let's sketch a wider vision, how the clusters we're part of, and adjacent ones, might fit together. Aside from the Hyperlink Team, I'm connected to a variety of local sub-graphs, including both:

• loose clusters of related interests and projects, e.g. people exploring poetic computation, tools for thought, experimental book clubs, and the future of computing
• more legible entities, whether named organizations or longer term projects or events, like Naive Weekly, HTML Energy, Index, and Rabbitholeathon — these can also intersect with the above!

…and that's still just one corner, the one where I tend to orbit :)

Other identifiable clusters, based on early Hyperlink activity, include:

• experimental game designers
• DIY creative tech projects
• alternative academic research
• independent creative study groups
• visual project management for comics or zines

The map continues to grow!

From our vantage point, this is the next level to explore — but we can imagine zooming out further, panning to other areas of the global map of internet learners and creators: other fields, other tools, other types of activity.

Small-scale social doesn't mean the entire social graph is small, just that it's made up of many local clusters, of varying size, interconnected in ways that make your local position feel more personal and cozy.

It's more like a network of small friendly neighborhoods that form a walkable web of a larger vibrant city, rather than an enormous mall you have to visit in order to meet your friends.

Hyperlink's Role in the Small-Scale Socialverse

So, we're building in this space — but where, exactly? What are we trying to make; what experiences and abilities do we want to enable?

Hyperlink's area of focus is something like small-scale social for collaborative learning and creative exploration.

In particular, we're all about making environments and infrastructure for doing ambitious, creative, agential work together with people we care about.

Some of the things we're working on to align with the above tenets of great small-scale social environments:

• Spaces that feel like magic circles, with clear boundaries and intimate membership, where all participants are invited and joining signals real intention to do meaningful things together
• Work surfaces for ambitious projects, a place to explore big goals, iterate toward creative visions, and produce interesting artifacts — tangible things that feel good to complete!
• Strong sense of context — ways to not only chat casually, but talk about specific things in detail, e.g. being able to comment on anything, and easily see what others are talking about and reply
• High-signal activity: notifications triggered by meaningful actions from people, not automated nags about things you don't care about
• Gradients of social participation, so people can inhabit flexible roles, in different projects and at different times, sometimes highly involved, sometimes dropping in for quick feedback or encouragement
• Help focusing intention and working memory: ways to designate things to do together, keep work in progress visible, identify next steps to keep momentum going, make process feel natural and fun
• Build a home together, a place on the internet to go to do particular things with particular people, where it feels nice to hang and work together, even when you're not in the same room

We hope these things can help us direct attention together, encourage positive feedback loops, find serendipity, do meaningful activity, hype each other up, spend time well, and nurture big ideas and dreams.

Going Big on Small

We've been playing with collaborative projects, environments for group work, and a variety of small experiments. We've been thinking about what it means to design your own campus, network, creative home…

What's next?

Right now we're thinking about how we can better support groups gathering on the internet — from community events and meetups, to tiny conferences and cohorts, experimental workshops, and more.

Convening to do things together…and doing things slowly over time. Hosting a garden party…while also tending to the garden.

For those of us seeking to explore this space, we can:

• Put out tendrils for potential projects & ideal collaborators
• Carve out corners for our small communities to try new things
• Forge connections with creators and learners exploring adjacent areas

We hope Hyperlink can play a role — a place to gather, organize, tinker on projects, and share our work. Of course, we encourage using any tools and platforms and spaces that work for you.

Join us in exploring small-scale social spaces on the internet! 🌱🌐🌀