The social network
When I say "social network", the first thing that will come to mind for most people would probably be: corporate walled gardens, invasive algorithms, doomscrolling, content creators, monetization, technofeudalism, enshittification, slop, and altogether Bad Stuff.
My intention is to resurface the original meaning of the term. Taken literally, it just means "a network of social relationships and interactions," the exact medium over which such network takes place need not be owned by tech oligarchs. In fact, a social network may take place in meatspace, and it can take many forms. In it's more immediate and fundamental form, it trascends the notion of "network" and it gets called "social tisue." Today's Silicon-valley social networks have the ill effect of tearing social tissue. I think we can fix that.
Is the bearblog a social network? By itself, I don't think it is. But it has the potential to become the platform to launch one, or, rather, to launch oneself onto one. There are already some efforts made in this direction, such as Junited 2026, which would have the potential to become an actual network of bloggers referencing others and encouraging exploration of like-minded people. Here is my own proposal.
The email network
As I will argue in a post about Simple Tools (TODO: write it and link it here), I already think the medium for a truly resilient social network has been with us for decades, long before the corporate walled gardens reared their ugly heads on the web. Inded, email is resilient, time-tested, and largely resistant to the efforts to censor and control discourse, free from algorithms, and as private as you care to make it (you can self-host your email, and encrypt all your messages with PGP, if you want), and it's not subject to failure of whoever is in charge, because no single entity is in charge, it is truly decentralized!
This is the reason why, as I mentioned in my previous post, I am planning to email some of the people here and elsewhere. They may or may not reply, we may or may not end up becoming friends. My only intention is to encourage the development of a true Social Network using what we already have and had had for decades, you could say, in the effort to "save" the internet, or, rather, to open our eyes to yet another alternatives to the technofiefs that would want us believe they are the only way people could possibly engage with each other. (Though, I've been informed, there's hardly any real people in there anymore, most of the "content" there being slop.)
So, again, expect an email from me. I am not going to send emails here and there just for the sake of it, however. So if you want to get ahead of me, please do! Throw me an email, and let's figure out how to make a resilient social network under the nose of the elites.
Next, I will write that post on simple tools.