About
DFOS is a tool for making worlds of your own.
A DFOS can be a community, publication, studio, institution, business, archive, scene, private internet, or something that doesn’t have a name yet.
It can be public or private. Free or paid. Temporary or permanent. Visible to everyone or known only to the people inside.
The people who create it decide.
Where DFOS came from
In May 2019, DFOS cofounder Yancey Strickler published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.”
The essay described a feeling that more and more people seemed to share: a growing resistance to being seen, tracked, measured, and performed in public online.
People were leaving the open internet for group chats, private accounts, newsletters, shared documents, and other smaller spaces where they could be more fully themselves.
These spaces were dark forests: alive, meaningful, and mostly invisible from the outside.
Seven years later, the ideas in that essay have become a product, a platform, a network, and a protocol.
That is DFOS.
