Welcome to Blue Respite

Together, we're building a community where friendships are real and mutual — where old friends stay connected, new ones are discovered, and every connection goes both ways. It's a place to share, reconnect, and be part of something that feels familiar, yet fresh in its simplicity. Where the emphasis is on sharing, discovering, and fostering meaningful connections between friends.

It's time to believe! I am well aware that launching this platform seems like a nutso, pie-in-the-sky idea. But I'm not trying to get rich, or build the biggest site, or be "important" to anybody. If we want a place where we can share with each other and that isn't a tool for exploiting us, then we must come together and make it happen oursleves.

This site does not and will not present advertising. This site does not and will not sell your data or insights about your behavior to anybody. On other platforms, the users are the product — corporations are paying for your ability to use them for free, because they receive more information about you than you can imagine.

Don't miss checking out our Philosophy in more detail.

Aren't There Already Alternatives?

This community will be friendship based. That is, two users must both agree with each other that they are friends. As friends, you are aware that you are sharing content with each other, and having mutual friends is meaningful.

All of the other alternatives that I have seen follow the Twitter model. That is, you might follow another user and that other user might not even know you exist. It's more about consuming information than sharing it. There is often no mutual, recipricol relationsip. To me, this is much more improfilel and is not why we're here.

An Enjoyable Free Tier

• This site will not present advertising or sell your data. That means our resources for running this thing are going to be really limited. There will necessarily be some limitations that we are not used to on the Big Platforms that sell us out.
• Users will have an amount of free disk space for storing things like images. Uploading videos will probably not be supported at first because they are big and therefore expensive to store. (Links to videos on other sites of course will be okay.) The photo sharing features will use your disk space as efficiently as possible. When space is filling up, you'll have some control over what happens as a result.
• Seeing what your friends are up to, and sharing your posts, will be the top feature priorties. Features that are focused on helping users sell things, attract an audience, or advertise venues or events per se will not be part of the this website for the foreseeable future.
• Our feed algorithm will be more transparent. You'll have more control so you can tailor what you see.
• The community will start as invitation-only. I profilelly am starting as a literal "User Zero" and I hope the community will grow organically, if slowly.

Growing Pains

• We may look clunky for a while. I am a programmer, not a designer. I'll try to polish things as we go, but getting things working is my strong priority for now. (A small team of volunteers is already beginning to take shape.)
• We are a website. We won't have native iPhone or Android apps for a while. This means we won't be able to send alerts that pop up on your phone or appear as that badge on an app icon.
• As a compromise, for users who want alerts, we'll have to use emails. We know this is not ideal, but it'll let us get started without having to remember to visit the website to check for activity.

Does a Free Tier Imply a Paid Tier?

Servers, Internet bandwidth, and other technical resources can be expensive, especially if our community grows. During the time our community is relatively small, the resources we need will be relatively modest, and we'll be okay.

But we cannot be our own victims. Demanding fancy features on a free website leads to advertising, as these features are complex and require investment to develop and maintain over time. For now, this site is being built by a teeny tiny team of volunteers.

I can see a roadmap where offering the option for more storage for images, bigger images or videos might require a modest subscription fee. There are other directions for expanding features or supporting a larger and larger community that also might not be possible without a modest subscription fee.

But the Subscription Fee Cart is so far before the horse it's barely worth the time to write this. But it is important I think to have in mind why there will initially be limits on things like image file size and number of images. It's good to be in the habit of knowing we can't have all the things for free. Because free is not free. We are obviously learning there are other costs and sacrifices that come with a free service.

Let's Do This Together

There aren't a hundred things to figure out to make this work, there are many thousands. I won't get it right the first time, most of the time. Please, please let's make this a conversation. If I have acknowledged a shortcoming or a missing or misbehaving feature, there's no need to complain about it. I'm working on it. But otherwise, please please let me know what needs to be added, fixed or improved.