In order to imagine where the future is headed, let’s first lay out the three main steps of connection building to examine how the physical and digital worlds fare at each:

• Discovery : you find someone you want to meet, or that person finds you 


• Connection : some initial contact is established


• Connection strengthening : further interactions

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Cocoon is one of a new wave of apps aiming to change the way we interact on social media. These new platforms don’t encourage you to accumulate likes or followers, or require that you diligently craft an online persona. Instead they want you to connect with a small, curated group of people, and that’s it.

This is a good thing. Group chats and invite‐only circles are where context and connection survive. These are spaces defined less by scale than by shared understanding, where people no longer perform for an algorithmic audience but speak in the presence of chosen others. Messaging apps like Signal are quietly becoming dominant infrastructures for... See more