Our town square

You can tell you're getting older when you start thinking, "things used to be better in the past".

However, that is exactly how we feel about the state of the internet today.

Our main interactions with other people on the internet happen mostly on big platforms: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (we refuse to call it otherwise). Those platforms changed a lot over the years, but all the fun has been sucked out of them. It's all about engagement, getting you to scroll endlessly, comparing yourself to other people (and thereby damaging the mental health of many people).

The internet used to be fun!

Remember the more innocent times? Fun on the internet peaked at around 2000-2010. A large part of that was because the internet wasn't consolidated yet. You might have been a member of a forum here, and you followed a blog over there. It was all scattered. No one cared about "engagement".

What's the point of this rant?

Bring back the fun!

Even though our main mission is to get desk dwellers to live healthier lives, we also want to bring back some fun on the internet. We want to make a cozy corner, a safe and uplifting space that is filled with people who care about getting healthier. Our town square.

If the community stays small, that's totally fine! We'd rather have a small community that actively cares about each other than yet another large platform filled with people who don't really know each other.

That's why we want to build a forum as the main gathering point for our community.

It's very Web 1.0, yes. That's what we like about it.

A more "modern" approach would be to create a Discord server, where chats can happen in real-time. We feel this generates too much FOMO, we think a slower-paced platform like a forum can foster a more relaxed experience.

The forum will be our town square. We will use Discourse as our forum tooling and host it ourselves.

What do you think?

As we haven't got a comment option yet, send your comment to: info@deskdwellers.town