I keep thinking about this notion of living with your friends instead of feeding each other updates every six months. This is especially alive for me right now as I am back in the Bay Area catching up with friends. Most of my friends are people I worked with or lived with—we did life together intensely at one point to form a strong bond, but now our lives have grown in wildly different directions. Often in these catchups I feel like I have to remember my former self and try to be that person in one way so there's a thread of continuity, but that feels like wearing too-small shoes.
Jesse's solution to this was that last year he rented a big house in Mexico for a month and invited everyone he knows (https://hinterlander.substack.com/p/an-invitation) to stop by for some time, and I'm hoping to make that an annual tradition. That sort of thing won't work for everyone, but for those who do make the trek I imagine it renews the bonds quite a bit.
Anyway, you and Cécile are invited to Mexico next winter :)
I think there's a huge amount of value in having old friends who you catch up with, even if you grow in different directions. Something about having people in your life who knew you in different phases of identity seems stabilising to me. As long as that's not the only kind of interaction though! I suspect most people's default 'trap' is to have mostly friends who are like that, which ends up creating some kind of drag to a past self, I think.
Thank you for the invitation! It's one we'll take seriously - love Mexico and winter is the exact time I'd want to escape London. It's a lovely approach too, wonderful example of "you can just do things"
> Something about having people in your life who knew you in different phases of identity seems stabilising to me.
Yes, so true. Seems the key is figuring out how to keep those relationships alive. Probably I need to learn how to better lean into being my present self in these contexts.
Very glad to hear you will take the invite seriously! Yay escaping the dreary winter. :)
I love that you are thinking about this too. It has been on my mind very much the last month or two in a personal friend demographic sense (how do I cultivate friendships that allow a more "co-living" connection), and longer than that in a "can I create an actual community living situation for my friends and family?" sense. I was largely inspired by the Supernuclear blog on Substack, which is mostly about full-on "co-living" (as in forms of cohabitating), but touches on more broad and flexible forms of co-living as well.
I think you've articulated several things very well here, particularly the frame of "talking about our lives" vs. "living them together". Unfortunately I think it's our culture that is broadly stacked against co-living in general, from the prioritization of work and the commonality of "9-5" schedules, to the primacy of the "nuclear family" (especially in the US, but AFAIK in many European countries too in this century). So it's up to us to find ways to prioritize co-living in our lives and with our friends (and family!). Hopefully with more and more people doing this, the sharing of ideas and experiences will help inspire and support ever more to do so.
Personally I'm a little skeptical of the "cozy web", particularly as far as Discord is concerned. Probably this is in good part due to the habits and preferences of my primary, local friend group, the vast majority of which have never used Discord, and for many of whom (myself included) chat-style interactions can be overwhelming and feel demanding rather than "cozy". Ironically I actually feel like Facebook at a certain stage, maybe 10-15 years ago, was a pretty great balance of broad and cozy. Before it got invaded by too many ads, company posts in general, feed "suggestions", etc, etc., it was a feed largely composed of updates on life from my friends, and I loved that. Now much of that is scattered to Instagram, with so many people (inexplicably to me) using Stories to share their life, which is ephemeral. If you're not there to see their story before it expires, it's gone! I don't get that practice... Anyway, I digress. My solution to this is actually to create a psuedo-Facebook on my own and try to get all my friends over to it. I like the central feed view that each person can have (which Discord lacks), the better capability for photo galleries (a common share on social media, e.g. kids, vacation, etc.), and all that. I'm likely going to use BuddyBoss and self-host, having looked at Friendica and Diaspora (and Mastadon) and found them all subpar for my needs. But of course if Discord works well for you and your friends, that's great!
Anyway I hope you continue to share your thoughts and experiences on this line of thinking and your experiments to bring more of this into your life!
I think you're right that modern culture has the deck stacked against us. It's hard to live near both friends and work (my ideal), people are more mobile, the majority of the week is taken up by a big shared block of work and commuting. And then kids enter the picture and it gets 10x more complex. Still, I think having the idea in the back of one's mind can act as a kind of partial antidote to help create lots of little nudges towards at least a little more co-adventuring.
Discord isn't ideal, by any stretch. I find it an assault on my senses and most communities I'm in I unfortunately ignore because they're too noisy. But it is free and it has many of the necessary features, aside from a social feed.
If you want to invest some cash into a closed social network for your friends, Mighty Networks might be a reasonable way to go. It's designed for much larger communities, but depending on your resources / willingness of friends to co-fund, it probably ticks all your boxes. I think more important than anything else though is probably a good invite-only filter and norms.
Thank you, great info! I definitely think that talking about all of this and keeping it in mind in our regular lives can help us notice opportunities for more connection within the structure of our existing living situation, routines, etc. Talking to others about it can be even more powerful and help find and/or create new opportunities in all these respects. I'm just at the beginning of doing that and I'm excited about where it could lead. So far I have good interest from my friends in a "cozy network" and now just need to pick the tool. Thanks again!
FYI I ended up selecting BuddyBoss for my community, which is a Wordpress plugin based on the BuddyPress plugin, but with a much nicer UI/UX. It is basically "Facebook of old" in terms of user experience, and so far I like it a fair amount vs. other options I saw. The best of its qualities aren't free, I think it's like $250/yr to maintain a license, but for me that's worth it. I went through a lot of evaluation of other tools, and then eventual evaluation of web hosts, plugins, CDNs, etc. for best performance,. So if anyone is interested in starting their own community based on BuddyBoss (or just knowing more about why I selected it and what alternatives I decided against and for what reasons) I'm happy to share what I've learned!
My community is just getting started and it remains to be seen whether it will actually maintain a decent level of ongoing engagement, or whether the pull of broader social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) will hold too much of people's attention. Even with the privacy and "cozy" angle (I literally called my community "CozyWeb" 😄), it's still an "additional" place people have to check and interact with and the friction may be too high. But I hope not!
Wow TIL "cozy web." So apt.
I keep thinking about this notion of living with your friends instead of feeding each other updates every six months. This is especially alive for me right now as I am back in the Bay Area catching up with friends. Most of my friends are people I worked with or lived with—we did life together intensely at one point to form a strong bond, but now our lives have grown in wildly different directions. Often in these catchups I feel like I have to remember my former self and try to be that person in one way so there's a thread of continuity, but that feels like wearing too-small shoes.
Jesse's solution to this was that last year he rented a big house in Mexico for a month and invited everyone he knows (https://hinterlander.substack.com/p/an-invitation) to stop by for some time, and I'm hoping to make that an annual tradition. That sort of thing won't work for everyone, but for those who do make the trek I imagine it renews the bonds quite a bit.
Anyway, you and Cécile are invited to Mexico next winter :)
I think there's a huge amount of value in having old friends who you catch up with, even if you grow in different directions. Something about having people in your life who knew you in different phases of identity seems stabilising to me. As long as that's not the only kind of interaction though! I suspect most people's default 'trap' is to have mostly friends who are like that, which ends up creating some kind of drag to a past self, I think.
Thank you for the invitation! It's one we'll take seriously - love Mexico and winter is the exact time I'd want to escape London. It's a lovely approach too, wonderful example of "you can just do things"
> Something about having people in your life who knew you in different phases of identity seems stabilising to me.
Yes, so true. Seems the key is figuring out how to keep those relationships alive. Probably I need to learn how to better lean into being my present self in these contexts.
Very glad to hear you will take the invite seriously! Yay escaping the dreary winter. :)
I love that you are thinking about this too. It has been on my mind very much the last month or two in a personal friend demographic sense (how do I cultivate friendships that allow a more "co-living" connection), and longer than that in a "can I create an actual community living situation for my friends and family?" sense. I was largely inspired by the Supernuclear blog on Substack, which is mostly about full-on "co-living" (as in forms of cohabitating), but touches on more broad and flexible forms of co-living as well.
I think you've articulated several things very well here, particularly the frame of "talking about our lives" vs. "living them together". Unfortunately I think it's our culture that is broadly stacked against co-living in general, from the prioritization of work and the commonality of "9-5" schedules, to the primacy of the "nuclear family" (especially in the US, but AFAIK in many European countries too in this century). So it's up to us to find ways to prioritize co-living in our lives and with our friends (and family!). Hopefully with more and more people doing this, the sharing of ideas and experiences will help inspire and support ever more to do so.
Personally I'm a little skeptical of the "cozy web", particularly as far as Discord is concerned. Probably this is in good part due to the habits and preferences of my primary, local friend group, the vast majority of which have never used Discord, and for many of whom (myself included) chat-style interactions can be overwhelming and feel demanding rather than "cozy". Ironically I actually feel like Facebook at a certain stage, maybe 10-15 years ago, was a pretty great balance of broad and cozy. Before it got invaded by too many ads, company posts in general, feed "suggestions", etc, etc., it was a feed largely composed of updates on life from my friends, and I loved that. Now much of that is scattered to Instagram, with so many people (inexplicably to me) using Stories to share their life, which is ephemeral. If you're not there to see their story before it expires, it's gone! I don't get that practice... Anyway, I digress. My solution to this is actually to create a psuedo-Facebook on my own and try to get all my friends over to it. I like the central feed view that each person can have (which Discord lacks), the better capability for photo galleries (a common share on social media, e.g. kids, vacation, etc.), and all that. I'm likely going to use BuddyBoss and self-host, having looked at Friendica and Diaspora (and Mastadon) and found them all subpar for my needs. But of course if Discord works well for you and your friends, that's great!
Anyway I hope you continue to share your thoughts and experiences on this line of thinking and your experiments to bring more of this into your life!
I think you're right that modern culture has the deck stacked against us. It's hard to live near both friends and work (my ideal), people are more mobile, the majority of the week is taken up by a big shared block of work and commuting. And then kids enter the picture and it gets 10x more complex. Still, I think having the idea in the back of one's mind can act as a kind of partial antidote to help create lots of little nudges towards at least a little more co-adventuring.
Discord isn't ideal, by any stretch. I find it an assault on my senses and most communities I'm in I unfortunately ignore because they're too noisy. But it is free and it has many of the necessary features, aside from a social feed.
If you want to invest some cash into a closed social network for your friends, Mighty Networks might be a reasonable way to go. It's designed for much larger communities, but depending on your resources / willingness of friends to co-fund, it probably ticks all your boxes. I think more important than anything else though is probably a good invite-only filter and norms.
Someone else has suggested https://150.earth/ as a platform, which looks much more like what you're needing
Thank you, great info! I definitely think that talking about all of this and keeping it in mind in our regular lives can help us notice opportunities for more connection within the structure of our existing living situation, routines, etc. Talking to others about it can be even more powerful and help find and/or create new opportunities in all these respects. I'm just at the beginning of doing that and I'm excited about where it could lead. So far I have good interest from my friends in a "cozy network" and now just need to pick the tool. Thanks again!
FYI I ended up selecting BuddyBoss for my community, which is a Wordpress plugin based on the BuddyPress plugin, but with a much nicer UI/UX. It is basically "Facebook of old" in terms of user experience, and so far I like it a fair amount vs. other options I saw. The best of its qualities aren't free, I think it's like $250/yr to maintain a license, but for me that's worth it. I went through a lot of evaluation of other tools, and then eventual evaluation of web hosts, plugins, CDNs, etc. for best performance,. So if anyone is interested in starting their own community based on BuddyBoss (or just knowing more about why I selected it and what alternatives I decided against and for what reasons) I'm happy to share what I've learned!
My community is just getting started and it remains to be seen whether it will actually maintain a decent level of ongoing engagement, or whether the pull of broader social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) will hold too much of people's attention. Even with the privacy and "cozy" angle (I literally called my community "CozyWeb" 😄), it's still an "additional" place people have to check and interact with and the friction may be too high. But I hope not!