Nine thoughts about DFOS

Hello from festive New York City, where Knicks fever became World Cup fever and now Pride weekend. Don’t know if we’ve ever seen the city party this much all the time. Vibes are high.

We love to join the party, but the DFOS crew is just as likely to find themselves tucked away in a corner pulling at the threads of a project or idea. That was us last week, as Ilya, Brandon, Lena, and myself gathered at our space in Chinatown for a week-long dive into the present and future of DFOS.

The week covered every facet of our universe: who we’re serving, what we’re building, how we tell the story, and where we’re going next. As is always the case, the deep time spent physically together created its own language and logic geolocated to that moment. Several new ideas crystallized in ways that felt obvious and effortless, yet had never quite been as clear before. 

Wonderful how that works.

Some of the ways our thinking evolved this week:

1. DFOS is a shared private internet. You have a Substack. You post on Instagram. You have a YouTube. What you don’t have is an intranet — a shared private space where you can release work, engage with your community, and collaborate with your team designed by and for you.

2. Two main kinds of DFOS spaces: private collabs and desktop worlds. Private collabs are for anywhere from 3 to 200 people (so far) to work together. Desktop worlds are where a single person or small team publishes to an engaged audience (anywhere from 50 to 5,000 people so far). 

3. Both types use private areas for collaboration and decision making. The desktop spaces (which range from record label homepages to newsletters to creator portfolios and catalogues) also have a more public area where an audience can watch, listen, read, chat, or lurk. The private collab spaces don’t have a visible surface.

4. DFOS spaces shouldn’t need to be always on. We’re not trying to create more screen time. DFOS should create shared rituals and moments that make time spent on DFOS consistently meaningful.

5. DFOS mostly emphasizes space. What’s missing is time. We offer a world but not a way to set its rhythms and fulfill expectations. Time is a far more fruitful way to think about solving this than space. This will soon change.

6. We don’t think generalized open spaces with lots of chatting and “community” will be a common thing on DFOS. Reddit is the better place for that. These are not the kinds of space we’re initially building for. They’re not the best way to get value out of DFOS.

7. Starting a DFOS based on your specific use-case shouldn’t require too much custom setup. Look for some pre-made space experiments in the near future.

8. Commerce and paid spaces will become part of DFOS sooner than later. We’ve been listening to suggestions on how we price and structure and are feeling good about our approach. More soon.

9. We already have a unique creative community across DFOS. What could it look like if we created ways for this network to come alive using formats native to us, rather than the internet platform logic we’ve become used to? We have some ideas.

All of this and more came up during conversations in our studio, Lena and I sitting on the floor, Brandon and Ilya on couches, NTS on the stereo, incense burning on a table nearby. Ideas were then mapped onto multiple reams of the DFOS butcher paper scroll, which Ilya turned into designs, and Brandon into architecture.

In other words, our kind of party.

Coming later this week

Later this week: the latest Hacienda release — an especially spicy one I won’t spoil. Look for details from Brandon on Wednesday.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a special solo episode of New Creative Era, with an audio version of a process-focused piece on my personal newsletter about how the Artist Corporation became law. Look for that in your RSS feed tomorrow.

What rhythm, release, ritual, or weird little corner is coming alive in your DFOS this week?

— DFOS