It's time for your own social media.

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I've always loved the internet. I still remember a friend in college showing me, a graphic design major who was designing books and flyers around campus, HTML. I still remember him showing me a few basic tags, how to add some color and text, and, poof, you have a website. As an art person, the ability to do a project, type a few keys, and instantaneously have it up and available to the world opened up a world of creativity and connection that I had not considered.

It was love at first click, and almost three decades later, my love affair with the web and design has never gone away.

I've designed and built quite a few projects over the years. From some of the biggest companies in the world to smaller organizations looking to make their own space, I've spent much time existing and creating online spaces. I am fortunate to have a career that has allowed me to engage with such a diverse group of people, ideas, and communities. Making different spaces for different people has been a constant joy in my life.

The unfortunate reality of those experiences is understanding that there are people who do not share this love of community-building in digital spaces and choose to use the gift of the internet to harass and demean people based on their assumptions, biases, and bigotries.

The history of the United States is replete with examples of people working together to create sustainable and healthy communities, only to fall to people who cannot exist outside their biases. From Seneca Village to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Oakland, California, to name a few, there has always been a specific reaction to people from targeted communities who want to control their spaces.

Combine this angst towards autonomous and safe spaces for marginalized people with multiple tech companies committing to business models that cater to people who enjoy harassing people while reducing privacy and ownership of our online selves, and the result is a dangerous and inhospitable web.

Yeah, I don't love it. It does seem pretty bleak.

However, amid all that negativity, there are opportunities to move past this paradigm that has defined online experiences for a long time.

How can we do it?

I'm glad you asked.

The Idea

In the context of working in the tech industry for, ahem, some years now, the usual thing would be to start another start-up to deal with the issues above, do the song and dance to gather up some funding, and, usually, sell it off and cash out, without actually solving the original issue.

I'm not going to do this. I'm a big believer in the idea that problems with creating and managing online spaces are not due to the nature of the tools but the culture and ethos guiding the tools being made. What is needed is an environment that recognizes the human need to exist in digital spaces safely.

This is why I founded hueristic instruments.

h.i. is a not-for-profit creative think tank that advocates policy to guide the creation of human-centric consent-based tools for independent social media in service of safe and dynamic communities.

Digital tools for and by humans are created to serve the needs of the communities that use them. Whether it be an individual creator looking to share their ideas with the world, organizations look for a platform where they can control who can engage with them or some mix of the two; the goal is to make it easy for people to create digital space that they not only own but can keep safe.

Ok, so what is being built? Read on, dear reader.

The Projects

Fipamo was born from a professional need to make sites easier to design and deploy. As I worked on it, I realized the potential it had to be a hub for one's online presence that could be agnostic about how it shares data with other platforms.

Imagine having a single source of truth for your data that you control and can decide what platforms they are being shared with, eliminating the need to use just one space to build a presence and audience.

Of course, safety will always be a concern when it comes to being online and allowing your site to interact with others because, let's face it, not everyone on the internet has good intentions. And having experienced an extensive amount of abuse and harassment myself as a former administrator, I share that concern on a very personal level.

That's why I built The Bad Space, a digital curation tool that can be used to identify online communities with a history of unprovoked harassment and abuse and locations that ignore consent to harvest data.

The purpose of The Bad Space is twofold. The first is to create an easy-to-use tool that independent communities can use to catalog sources of harm that seek to torment their spaces. The second is to provide a way for communities to share their catalogs to make networks of trust capable of growing and changing with the needs of the groups that use them.

Fipamo will integrate with The Bad Space to create a new and cohesive experience that prioritizes independence, autonomy, and safety of the people who use it.

And yes, both projects will always be open source.

The Plan

Currently, Fipamo is in beta as the core set of features is solidified, and The Bad Space is still in an alpha state as only the basics are in place, so there's still some work to be done. Let's hit the key points.

Fipamo

The Bad Space

The Process

Currently, I've been developing Fipamo and The Bad Space exclusively. However, it has gotten to the point where I need 1. to make it my primary focus and 2. to hire additional resources to help get it across the finish line. So here's a breakdown of how the funds would be used.

50k - This will cover living expenses (rent, food, travel) and will focus on building both projects to a release-ready state.

40k - To hire additional part-time resources to fill in the gaps as I get through the major features and additions and write the documentation.

5k - Securing an adequate server for members wanting to use Fipamo but not wishing to self-host and an appropriate companion CDN. Any remaining funds will be used to hire additional resources to assist with the development.

5k for an emergency fund to deal with unexpected situations, i.e., server incidents, DDoS attacks, harassment campaigns, etc

The end goal of this is twofold.

The first is a feature-complete Fipamo that handles multiple types of content, can federate with any Activity Pub-enabled platform if one chooses to do so, and provides robust safety tools to protect the site from unwanted interactions.

The second is to have a fully realized version of The Bad Space that is accessible and easy to use, as well as customize one's blocklist that can be exported in multiple formats and updated as the database grows.

Conclusion

The unfortunate reality of the web is that not everyone on the internet is friendly, and many centralized platforms cater to these people to sustain unhealthy and toxic growth.

However, as many centralized services race to the bottom, a new opportunity has been presented to make online community-building human-centric again. We are open to more than just a few available centralized platforms that do not care about the quality or health of our spaces.

But now, not only do we have the ability to have platforms that we own top to bottom, but also the ability to build tools that reflect our values as people who want to build healthy, thriving communities and not just a set of inaccessible features applicable to a handful of tech-focused people.

We don't have to wait to make a social web experience that is as fun, weird, and curated as we want.

This is the future. We can do that right now.

-ro, h.i. founder