Why Communities

I know what you’re thinking, do we really need yet another social platform? Aren’t there enough already? It’s a fair question. To answer it let's look at how the social media landscape looks today, the incentives that shape them, and what kind of outcomes those incentives produce for people and for society. From there, we can explain why we’re building Communities and how it’s intentionally different.

Today’s landscape

There’s a wide range of social platforms, each with its own flavor, but most share the same underlying purpose:

Facebook focuses on general social networking, their moto: "connect and share with the people in your life." but we all know that at their core they just want to sell your attention and data.
Instagram by the same company emphasizes photos and short videos directed on lifestyle and aesthetics.
YouTube is primarily a video-sharing platform with limited social interactions and capabilities.
Reddit is community-led network with focus on text-based content, a place for discussion and learning, an awesome and respectable platform.
LinkedIn centers on professional identity and career networks.
TikTok popularized short-form video and viral trends, rewarding content that grabs attention quickly.

While each is different all of these platforms have one thing in common, their business model. They all monetize primarily through advertising. They do this by studying user behavior at scale to make their ad inventory more valuable to advertisers. This isn't a moral judgment, it's simply the reality of their incentives. A company's business model is its primary purpose. When the customer is the advertiser, the product becomes human attention, with everything else bending around that fact. And that's how social platforms become Ad Marketplaces.

The issues with Ad Marketplaces

When the advertiser is the customer, attention becomes the product, and a few predictable patterns start to emerge. The first is that maximizing screen time turns into a core objective. Revenue starts to grow with the amount of time users spend on screen, with the whole system becoming optimized for it.

An ad marketplace needs to satisfy the advertisers. And so gradually every feature, every design choice and every algorithmic tweak, starts serving the goal of grabbing your attention and monetizing it. Ranking systems, engagement metrics, and recommendation engines evolve to grow ad value, instead of deepening human relationships. And all the content that reaches you has the hidden insentive of collecting your preferences so that the platforms can increase the dollar value of your profile to sell to advertisers.

Naturally over time, this dynamic transforms social platforms into attention economies where everyone competes for attention. Users start chasing followers and reach so they too can monetize it, and the platforms will reward what performs, not what nourishes connection. People are no longer seen as participants in a social network but rather as content producers and consumers whose attention and preferences can be mined for profit.

The near future promises to intensify these trends. As generative media becomes more capable of capturing attention, ad-driven systems will eagerly distribute it. But more attention doesn't necessarily mean more meaning, value or happiness, only that the race to capture the human gaze will grow even more efficient.

Now, there is nothing inherently bad with ads, advertisers, or attention economies, they have been part of human society for as long as we can remember and they play an important role in our lives. The issue is when we treat these platforms as social networks, and use them in hopes to get social connection and validation.

Content sharing networks running on attention economies will never meaningfully fulfill our need for belonging. So the danger is not in the content they serve us, but rather in believing the story that they will help us feel connected.

The effects on society

It’s hard to pin exactly how social media has been affecting society, especially in this fast-paced era of ours, but there seem to be these general trends:

Loneliness is rising. People report feeling more isolated, especially individuals with increased on-screen time. By contrast, those with strong, regular, in-person connections tend to be happier and healthier.
We've become globally informed and locally disconnected. Access to global knowledge is a amazing. But many of us know less about what's happening in our neighborhoods than we used to. Historically, knowing your locality, people, places, and nature, mattered. It made us built mutual respect, responsibility, and care.
Non-personal interactions are less empathetic. When we don’t know each other, we’re less likely to be kind and understanding. Non-personal online interactions tend to lack empathy and accountability.
Network structure shapes behavior. Research in networked game theory (e.g., work by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz) shows cooperative behavior thrives in local, repeated interactions, and breaks down in large, anonymous networks where people seldom meet again. In simpler words large global networks tend to make us behave badly.

These patterns suggest we might need a different approach, instead of large global social networks, we should get back to smaller more personal networks that privilege local connection, repeated interactions, and shared goals.

Communities: a community‑first, locally‑focused social platform

"A community is a group of people that agree to grow together." - Simon Sinek

We are not just trying to remove ads. We are building a whole new type of social network, one focused on local connections and tight communities.

We are creating a connection economy. Our goal is to help people grow communities and have local, in-person experiences. We want you to go offline, have in-person experiences, build local connections, and discover more about your neighborhood and region. Communities focus on common goals and mutual prosperity rather than selfish incentives.

This minimizes the self-promoting behavior often found in attention economies and makes the platform focus on what matters -- connecting you with your local communities.

For regular users, our priority is making it easier to find what's happening around them. And for community builders, we want to provide all the necessary tools to help them build and grow local communities.

There's much more we have our eyes on, from community governance to helping local economies thrive, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, one step at a time.

A different business model: the user is the customer. We won't sell ads or user data. Users are our customers, and we build for them, not advertisers.

Users will help us determine which features are most important to build. Part of that means building a system where users can directly impact the platform's roadmap at communities.site/roadmap.

In this business model, trust becomes one of the most crucial aspects for us. That's why we're committed to operating with transparency. Business decisions, financials, and ownership details will be open for everyone to see. There's a lot to consider here, from open-source to integrating with open social web protocols like ActivityPub. The topic is broad and deserves its own article, so be on the lookout when we share more about our plans on user privacy and company transparency.

We are Solving real problems. Local communities face many problems: discovering nearby resources and relevant contacts, organizing events and projects, sustaining engagement and growth, managing shared funds and assets, and creating a fair and transparent space for governance. Most existing platforms aren't designed for these needs, and don't care to solve them. But we do!

Our goal is to make these problems easier to deal with, so that local communities can spend more time doing the things they love the most.

The freemium model: free basic functionality, subscriptions for advanced features. We can't be foolish, to make this work, we need someone paying for the service. Since unethical practices aren't an option, we have to monetize functionality through subscriptions.

Most users will use the platform for free, but subscriptions provide access to advanced features. Our initial focus will be on Community Subscriptions, building features that help communities organize themselves and grow. Later, with User Subscriptions, we'll give users easier ways to find and connect with peers and their locality, advanced forms of search and recommendations, as well as cosmetic and configuration options.

Overall, we're taking a new approach to how social networks work on a fundamental level. We aim to move away from the attention economy that dominates social media today and toward a connection economy, one built around creating tools that help nurture meaningful interactions, community growth, and shared human experiences rather than endless content consumption.

Can this work?

It is healthy to doubt this. After all many have tried to build alternative social platforms before. Most have failed. Why would this be any different? There are a few trends happening lately that make us believe this time it can work.

Communities are having a moment. People crave connection, belonging, and purpose, perhaps more than at any time in recent memory. A community first social media is something that has not been explored much in the past.
People are becoming tired of attention economies. More users are recognizing how traditional social platforms prioritize engagement over wellbeing. There's growing awareness that the endless scroll, algorithmic feeds, and attention-grabbing content don't serve our deeper needs for connection and meaning. This fatigue creates demand for platforms that put people first.
It's never been more feasible to build and serve products. Modern tools make it faster and cheaper to build software. While hardware is becoming more capable and affortable. And by not serving advertisers, we avoid the enormous costs of large‑scale behavioral analytics, so we can invest those resources in building value for users. This makes it possible for us to stay thin and focused on what matters.
People increasingly pay for value. A decade or two ago, subscriptions were a hard sell. Today, when a product provides real value, people are more willing to support it directly. Services like Netflix and Spotify normalized subscription payments and it's been more common than ever to pay for a valuable service.
AI content crisis. AI generated content is becoming mainstream, with most social-media already serving it. When all the comments become a discussion on wether it's AI generated or not content loses it's meaning, and people move on to more tangible experiences.
We’re in this for the right reasons. Building a social media platform is hard work. It takes incredible passion and dedication. People who primarily care about getting a return on their investment have much better options. We truly believe in building a better platform to support today's social needs. Prioritizing this gives our team the energy to endure through tough and uncertain times.

There's a long road ahead and no guarantees. But we're committed to trying. We believe people deserve platforms that put society first, and we're determined to build one. Are you with us?