Is Somewhere Good the Future of Social Media?

We're also thinking about what the potentials are in an online platform that is thinking about IRL connection as well.

We wanted to explore what it would look like if we created a social-media platform that moves against hierarchy and making people into brands. What care and safety mean when creating online connections that feel more tender and meaningful and not so transactional and extractive. And we’re thinking about citation, ensuring that creators and people o... See more

Our existences online are by nature incomplete and intended for consumption. Is it possible to bring your whole self to a social-media platform? Is it possible to get the connection and conversation we crave without the doomscroll?

Our first values are rooted in deepening connection, and in honoring and supporting Black expression. Oral tradition is deeply rooted in Blackness. There’s a certain vulnerability in audio, and we wanted to explore that intimacy. There is a deepened connection to our selfhood with voice. There is a nuance that voice captures that often isn’t found ... See more

So much of social media is, by design, condensed information — it’s made to be bite-size. So the internet feels faster paced. It’s been really soothing to go to a space where I’m still meeting my desire to connect with people and talk with people, but in a digital realm that’s slower, and that is allowing for a bit more vulnerability, a bit more co... See more

Social media is designed to make us all consumable, which translates into turning people into brands. Brands have one single message, and they’re always signaling that one specific, digestible message.

I was thinking about what joy looks like to me on the internet, and I was brought back to earlier conceptions of playful online spaces: Neopets, Club Penguin, Microsoft Paint, those early chaotic days of MySpace, customized Tumblr blogs. When I think about the design of social-media apps today, it’s very clean and very minimalist, lending itself to... See more

We believe Somewhere Good can support people in connecting with more intention and tenderness, and the ways that we can encourage people to learn, archive, and connect to one another as sources of knowledge.

I don’t think that we’re meant to navigate our lives solo. That is a narrative that Western culture, specifically when it’s at the intersection of capitalism, really loves to hold — the narrative of hyperindividuality.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook run on users’ feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, providing an endless, scrolling loop of aspiration, virtue signaling, and doom.