Overstory Principles

What this is

A slow social network shaped like a set of places rather than a feed. The daily tick is a printing press, not a firehose: writing settles into editions, editions end, and the site tells you when you're done. People wear profiles (pseudonymous masks, they can choose to have one or several), gather in clubs, meet sideways through topics. The operating theory: attention is the scarce and sacred input, and the system should return attention to its owners rather than harvest it.

The diagnosis

A social feed cannot become a third space, because there is no persistent third object there that is the shared thing between subject and object.

A feed can temporarily form a social bond; you meet others in the replies to some famous post, you follow someone who says something witty, and maybe they follow back and a real social bond is formed. This is the exception, rather than the rule in the modern media feed system, because feeds are designed to be performances for the world, consumed globally and generally one-to-many unidirectional. In short: twitter creates a lot of subjects, but what are the shared objects? Nothing. It is a hollow place.

A feed has no furniture: you arrive, it scrolls, you leave, nothing is different. A third space has persistent things in it: a noticeboard, a shelf, a schedule, a thing being built. People connect most durably not by pointing at each other but by paying attention to the same things: the thing is the point of contact. Activity theory supports this notion, a community without a shared object degrades into audience relations. Overstory provides calls, topics, gatherings, and anthologies, which are not features; they are objects of joint activity.

Digital third spaces have persistence of connection, boundaries around what we are attending to, memory and focus. In a third space, I am known. In the modern feed, I perform.

Principles

Everything is experimental

I have no idea what I am doing. I have ideas about principles, I do not actually know how to build a system that perfectly enacts those principles. Overstory will always change, will always be reinventing itself. It is an organic, growing place.

Places, not feeds

Every surface should feel like somewhere you went, not something that came to you. Profiles, clubs, and topics share one shape: pinned furniture (memory), this tick's edition (the present), a small curated outside slot (a window): and you visit them in your profile. The one non-place is your own daily, finite feed (the edition), which contains only what you explicitly chose. It is hard to capture travel and placeness on the web; we try anyway: porch, front door, noticeboard, occasional mingles.

The feed ends

The front page is the last tick's writing. It is finite, it ends, and it says so. There is no infinite scroll to fall into and no "while you were away" debt to feel behind on.

Attention is chosen, and explainable

Everything in your daily edition is there for a single reason - you follow the person who wrote it. Nothing tries to grab your attention, you have to choose to seek it out. There are no chips with numbers trying to make you look at a thing. Nothing is pushed to you, you must visit the club to read the posts there, you must visit a topic to see what other people are saying.

Discovery lives in fixed-size slots, placed by a human

We need to support people finding each other through shared interest, but we cannot leverage algorithmic or infinite discovery along the way. Club moderators can share a finite number of posts with their members, Club anthologies have room for a single moderator-selected wildcard post found by the moderators (and consented to by the post author). By limiting these slots and making them human-created, we go against the grain of discovery feeds.

Selection and permission never mix

Who may see a thing (audiences and permissions) is one system; what a reader chooses to look at (follows, memberships, visits) is another. People visit topics to see what they want, topics are not used to share or push content into people's feeds. You can share a post to a club, but that share goes into the club's drawer, not the front page of the club. You cannot follow topics, only visit them. You need to seek out content you want, not have it pushed on you by others.

Bonding and bridging are different actions

Clubs are bonding capital: small, gated, dense, self-knowing ("Bay Area Potters"). Topics are bridging capital: global, open, thin, connective ("Pottery"). Healthy communities need both - you need to find other people by looking at a topic to find out what other people are writing about. Topics are the public noticeboard in the coffeeshop. Clubs are the book group meeting in the coffeeshop, their regular meeting time posted on the pinboard (a topic-post talking about the book club).

Intentional acts, budgeted

One post a day. Posts get one topic. You can write one comment per day per post. Use it wisely, use it intentionally, but also don't be afraid to not use it. You need to choose what you're going to write about today. In places where this would cause anxiety, we have mechanisms to make that easier. You can write your one post a day about whatever topic you want, and still write another post to answer a Call from one of your clubs- club responses come from a different budget. You can draft as many posts as you want, but only post one a day.

Slow by default; realtime only inside consent

The tick is the heartbeat, and almost everything settles on it. This includes private direct messages, deliberately: correspondence, not chat. Realtime is permitted only in a bounded space among a small, mutually consented set of people (the coauthoring post workshop; a club room with hours, the understory). The deep reason is structural: our moderation model rests on durable, pinnable, attributable artifacts, and ephemeral chat has nothing to pin. The fast layer can live where it already lives (a club's Discord, a text chain, a physical porch); we are the slow, durable memory layer.

Moderation is a commons, and it isn't designed yet

The vouch/flag/reject machinery is the armature on which we will build a moderation system. It was designed in principle before anyone started using Overstory. It's not ready yet. Most of this is hidden during the alpha and beta. Ostrom's commons principles (locally adapted rules, participants shape the rules, graduated sanctions, cheap conflict resolution) are the intended shared vocabulary for that conversation.

Collaboration is the happy path

Where possible, build so the natural way through the site is making things WITH people: calls answered together, wiki pages tended together, drafts co-authored in the workshop, gatherings attended.

Consent matters

Any change that impacts a person asks that person: either pre-consent (a policy they set: "anyone may write me letters," "only people I follow") or per-action consent (an invitation they accept or decline). One or the other must exist for every multi-user action; silence is never a yes.

The operator is a person, not a business model

I wrote this and am paying the bills. The system should be able to stay small and good. There are no KPIs, no monetizable moments. There is some supporter functionality, and some small perks granted to supporters, but supporter tier will never be required for extra writing, visibility, or core functionality.