A karass is “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.” I think of rss.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat’s Cradle, which you should read, because it’s some of the best story-telling out there, and it’s full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.

Anyway…

In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.

In the case of rss.chat — what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren’t logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it’s not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time — as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I’m not selling a product here — I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps — blogging, RSS, podcasting.

The idea is this — the web itself is a social network. It’s up to us, all of us, not just me — to build that network.

When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.

In the meantime I’m going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we’ll be sure to let you all know about that.

For now, I’m operating a network for people I work with, and it’s all open for anyone to read. That’s also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a “Fractional horsepower social network,” stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.

I don’t want to turn the world over to a startup, we’ve done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.