Hey everyone, Eric here. Hoping you’re all keeping safe and healthy out there…
First off, thanks for sticking with us through this bout of silence. We’ve been heads down preparing for this release and wanted to hold off on any announcements until we had something ready to roll out.
This week, we’re moving into the “friends and family” release of our alpha and will onboard up to 500 members over the next month. We’ll then bring on the several thousands of our crowd-funders and people on our waitlist throughout May and June.
We’ve been laser-focused on designing new patterns that are truly human-centered and on ensuring our technology is scalable for the sort of intentional growth we’re anticipating this year. We’re optimistic that the extra time we’ve put into building a stronger foundation will pay off in the long run.
To give you an idea, here are some of the things that I’m personally excited about:
Less noise. More signal.
A clean, more intentional means of navigation. Singular focus on each screen.
Feeds free from advertisements, data-mining, and paid propaganda.
Expression without the rating metrics. Comments hidden by default.
Community center for transparent, real-time updates and feedback from you all.
Custom perspectives (feeds) over harmful AI and echo chambers.
Ability to filter any perspective by channel (topic).
Multiple layers of relations that reflect our physical world experiences.
Packs: Agent-centric Communities
Packs are communities centered around each individual. Each person will have their own pack where they can add up to 49 other members.
Your pack will automatically display all of your public posts, all the public posts of your pack members, as well as the private posts you share to just your pack. The design inspiration here is that each person is more than what they choose to share - they are a reflection of the people closest to them. It also provides individuals with a space to be more honest, free, and authentic.
In this light, each person is their own community. Your pack may include people from different parts of your life that don’t know each other. I’m stoked to see how packs will enable the facilitation of new organic relationships and content discovery between one another through the common ground of each pack owner.
Up Next
Current developments we plan to finish throughout Alpha II.
Public/private comments
A Medium-like rich text editor
Audio and video expressions
Discovering information and people through degrees of separation
Private groups
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect. We’re excited to see you on Junto and refine these patterns with you all moving forward.
In the meantime, we have an ask for you. We’re currently raising more funds to take this to where we know it can go. Please consider chipping in $5 here or reaching out to me at eric@junto.foundation if you’d like to invest and read our one-pager. Though we’re a nonprofit, we’re also raising short-term loans that will be paid back at a fairly substantial factor rate. Arthur Brock, co-founder of Holochain, is the first to participate in this round.
Finally, big shoutout to this team and to you all for your goodwill and commitment to maintaining a high level of integrity. What’s happening in today’s climate has illuminated more of the much-needed change we need to make and we look forward to initiating that together with you now and in the coming years.
With anticipation,
Eric
#YesIt’sReal
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We want your feedback.
Like what you see? Share it! Think we can be doing things better? Let us know. We’re open to ideas so DM us at hi@junto.foundation or drop any of the team members a note at their individual emails listed on our website here.