There’s a lot of movement going ‘round in the social network space these days. Some of can be considered forced, like TikTok users moving to a clone of it to avoid US bans, or people avoiding Meta properties like Facebook or Instagram because of hate speech changes.
But today I want to present a new social network that seems much more experimental, not just a direct replacement of something existing. You might recognise parts of it from blogs and similar tools for written worlds, but it tries to change your engagement pattern quite a bit:
(that’s two I’s with four Z’s sandwiched between them, reminding you of “easy”)
Today is all that matters #
If you go to the home page, there’s no big landing site, no screed about what glorious experience you’ll find there. You can login or register, that’s it. Logo is just some (IMHO mediocre) ASCII art.
While that might change, I think it fits the theme quite well: This isn’t a stand-alone social network. There’s no global feed of messages, no “matchmaking”. It’s assumed that you meet friends on other platforms, and you only see each other’s messages if both of you added each other’s user name.
That’s the first property: You only see the messages of “mutuals”.
The way I see it right now, it’s not like those Facebook or Whatsapp clones for family alone, where it’s intended to be a close-knit circle with privacy, it’s more about not drinking from the fire-hose.
After you’ve registered and logged in, you can either view what people have been writing for today, or write tomorrow’s content. If you just registered, there’s no content for today yet. Add your friends, and you’ll see what they wrote tomorrow.
That’s the second property: You only see one day of messages.
Ephemerality is rather rare. Sure, chats get deleted and who cares anyway about your Discord conversation from last May? Snapchat had this as a central feature, but here I think it’s more about focus and mindfulness than privacy.
And that’s basically it. Technically it’s nothing special, there’s a “blog post” per participant each day, with the usual formatting (markdown) and maybe an image. But as usual, it’s the constraints that create the medium. You don’t have a timeline, you don’t communicate with users that didn’t contact you beforehand and were you “negotiated” becoming mutual IZZZZI users on some other site.
This is still quite new. I don’t think the site’s owners will change a lot in the future, but what will emerge out of this? I’m reminded of twitter in its early age, where now ubiquitous things like hashtags just arose out of the daily usage. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this will rival twitter in its popularity, just that it’s as raw as when I still could get a three-letter username there.
Things I already saw:
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People are free with their follows. This isn’t just for people you already consider closer friends, just write someone that you want to become a mutual and usually it’s granted. (This is really straining against my introversion, definitely a learning experience)
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People post personal snapshots, poetry, their daily journal and even bits of code. It’s a wild mixture.
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The first “conversations” are creeping in. Adding an “@” doesn’t stand out, so people mark each other’s names by turning it into
code.
It won’t replace mastodon, bluesky or your personal blog if you’re into any of that. But it’s a neat experiment and you’ll probably going to see and read content you don’t get anywhere else from those people.
So join up, and message me at mastodon or via email, and I’ll add you.
