Why Make Circles?
read moreSocial Media is not designed to improve your life or the world
After over two decades it is clear that the cost of our dominant privately owned social networks far outweigh their benefits. We seem to have more relationships but they are also more tenuous and fragile. We have plentiful access to tailor-made entertainment, but it is tailored to seize and hold our attention, not to nourish our spirits or sharpen our minds. Distraction has replaced depth resulting in less real social engagement, worse mental and physical health, increasing societal conflict and ever decreasing personal agency. Our every move online is monitored and algorithmically optimized to propel us in whatever direction will generate the platform more profit, irrespectively of if it is to our detriment or not.
In one sentence, social media platforms were never designed for us, they were designed against us
But it doesn't have to be this way.
That's Why We Are Building MakeCircles
MakeCircles is designed for the Changemakers of the world, because you are needed now more than ever. We want to give you the tools, resources, connections and agency to accomplish your goals. A platform that allows you to do your work in an open, transparent and collaborative way. No advertising, spying, manipulation or selling of user data. Quite to the contrary, our goal is that you own and control all your data and all your relationships and, ultimately, all your funding streams.
What can MakeCircles Do?
MakeCircles is currently in our beta testing phase. This means we are not ready for public use as we need to test the platform for bugs and also have a number of new features and improvements to do. That said, we already have all the basic social functionality in place and then some.
For instance, we have an integrated geographical interface, that allows you to create and pin circles to a map, or use it to find projects, events, people and opportunities both locally and globally. It is also possible to write and vote on proposals or create and allocate tasks to users to make more progress. We have a number of other democratic governance functions we will add and test before we go public, as well as privacy functions, video conferencing, crowd funding, resource sharing and more. We have also designed MakeCircles to give our users control over themselves and their communities. You decide who you share what information with and give what access to.
Tom
Talking
Sense
How You can help
There are a number of ways you can help. First, create a profile, explore the platform, invite some friends. Then, create a project or a community circle and test the features. Let us know about the issues you come across and if you have any ideas for new features or better designs, create a proposal and we'll add it to the public vote. MakeCircles is a co-creative platform. We are designing it to work for you, and you are the best judge of what that means.
If you are as inspired by this as we are, there are many other ways to help out too. Developers, designers, marketers, community leaders, project owners, funders, we'd love to have you on the team. Please visit Social Systems Lab's webpage for more info.
Who do we think we are?
We are a small team with big visions running a not-for profit, oligarch-free platform designed to outcompete the best of its for-profit competitors. The project custodian is The Social Systems Foundation that is committed to open-source technology to serve humanity and the planet. You can read more about us on Social Systems Lab's webpage, and if you share our vision and are interested in joining our motley crew of Changemakers, we'd most definitely welcome the conversation. Just send us a message!
Tell Me More...
Still wondering why you should join MakeCircles as a test pilot?