Interviews with random people off the street: "Why are you on DFOS?" 🤔

What follows is a collection of interviews with various people off the street: "Why are you on DFOS?"

Two decades ago when I lived in NYC, one of my favorite restaurants was Joe's Shanghai down in Chinatown.  I ate soup dumplings there a lot.  Now I'm in Cincinnati, I goto Corner Dumpling House up in Montgomery.  Both places serve soup dumplings.  Both places are able to thrive because they're separated by 639 miles.  On the public internet, we have neither the blessing nor curse of geography so we currently live online in a world where there's only Joe's Shanghai.

I've been thinking about this a lot, ever since dfos alpha first dropped in February. Namely, a common question I often wonder: "Is whatever I'm seeing the final form?  And if it's not, what's next?"

When I think about the first quarter century of the internet (~2000-2025), I think it'll be roughly remembered as the "Individual Internet".  We all had our own MySpace/FB/IG/Twitter/Reddit/YouTube handles.  Everything was oriented around the individual.  And to participate, we joined big public spaces as individuals where anyone and everyone could post.  It was fine.  And as a means of consuming information, it's certainly done wonders.  I've learned a ton online.  But as a mechanism for meeting other people, it was lacking.  When I click on a top-performing Reddit or X post served to me via algorithm, I don't know anything about the individual – I am strictly only clicking for the content.  Yes, some big names (Derek Thompson, et al) have made it big.  But at global scale, Power Law kicks in, Derek Thompson gets richer, and everyone else gets poorer.  And that's the internet we have now.  A few kings and queens.  Everyone else exhausted.

So a question, then: could we do better?

Could we create a new internet where we defeated the Power Law?

To me, that is what dfos —at its heart— essentially is: a bid to shatter the One Big Internet into Thousands of Different Internets.  And it's not Reddit either.  Because with Reddit, you'll still have r/movies with its 37 million members.  And then all the other subreddits.

With dfos, I think the best spaces will be sub-Dunbar (<150 people).  It's a re-imagining of how we spend our online lives.  Instead of blindly scrolling for content, what if we interacted with people?  Instead of finding meaning individually, what if we found meaning collectively?

Since February, I've essentially quit all social media (Bluesky and Substack).  The only social spaces online I now give my lifeforce to are dfos spaces.  I don't care about broadcasting my thoughts to the global town square with its hundreds of millions because (let's be honest) no one's listening anyway.  So I'm here on dfos to try something new: to escape planetary-scale internet to return to human-scale.