Every social platform starts with the same promise: connect with people.
Most of them end up connecting you with content instead.
There’s a reason for that. Feeds are sticky. Notifications pull you back. Engagement metrics are easy to measure, easy to optimize, easy to show investors. Human connection is harder to quantify. So it gets deprioritized – slowly, quietly, until the product you’re using looks nothing like what it promised.
We made a decision early on: locals will never have a feed.
Not because we couldn’t build one. Because we think it would destroy the thing that makes locals work.
When you type five words and get one email introducing you to one person – that moment has weight. It feels rare because it is rare. You pay attention. You reply. Something starts.
If we showed you a stream of potential matches, updated constantly, optimized for clicks – that feeling disappears. You’d scroll. You’d compare. You’d wait for someone better. And you’d never actually talk to anyone.
The feed is the problem, not the solution.
We’re not the first to notice this. But we might be one of the few building something different on purpose, from the start, without planning to “add it later.”
Later never comes with a different answer. The architecture you choose at the beginning is the product you end up with.
So: no feed. One match at a time. One email. Then we get out of the way.
That’s the whole idea.
Have thoughts on this? You know where to find us – type the right five words.
