Philosophy

We need a place to connect, to share, to keep up to date with each other. I am solidly Gen-X and this platform will reflect that. This site will be a respite from the constant advertising, the constant selling of our information, and the constant yet seemingly-useless interface changes that leave us grumbling at the screen way too often.

This site is not going to try to do all the things. We'll have the core features we need &mash; friends, posts, The Feed, comments, profiles, pictures, and messages. That's about it.

No games. No events. No selling of things. No advertising. Nothing where the primary objective is to exploit us or get our money.

I think a less-is-more approach can be sustainable. And I think we can be a happy community with reasonable, not unlimited, features. It may take some getting used to, however.

This site will start out as a free platform. But "free without advertising and exploitation" by definition means there isn't a lot of money to spend on servers and storage and bandwidth. I don't know what they are yet, but there will necessarily be some limits on things like image sizes or number of stored images and so forth. I feel this is a fair trade for privacy.

If we find that as a community we need more than we can have for free, I will not resort to advertising. Even limited advertising is the first step on the slippery slope to serving the needs of advertisers at the expense of the community. Not gonna do it.

Therefore, should we need it, I can envision offering a modestly priced paid membership that could help us achieve what we want without selling ourselves to the advertisers. I may be completely wrong about how unpalitable that might be, but we're going to try it.

Expecting (demanding) all the things for free has led us to where we are today. That is too high a price to pay.