We wanted somewhere that felt like ours

Arrah and I share quite a lot of our lives on the internet.

Which makes building a private social network feel slightly contradictory.

People we've never met know what we've been doing, where we've travelled, what we're working on and rather more about our lives than either of us would probably have imagined a few years ago.

We like that.

We've met some lovely people because of it. People have followed our story, sent us messages, laughed with us and occasionally offered opinions on things we definitely didn't ask for opinions on.

That's part of putting your life on the internet.

But not everything belongs there.

And the more we've shared publicly, the more we've started thinking about the things we don't.

There isn't a dramatic origin story

I'd love to tell you that Arrah and I were sitting somewhere beautiful when one of us suddenly had the idea for the nook.

We weren't.

There was no napkin with an early sketch on it. Nobody said, "What if we built a social network?" while inspirational music played in the background.

It grew out of lots of smaller conversations.

Arrah's family is in the Philippines. Mine is in the UK. We have friends and family scattered around, different group chats for different combinations of people, photographs sent here, conversations happening there and the occasional attempt to remember which app somebody sent something on six months ago.

None of this is a disaster.

WhatsApp works. Messenger works. Group chats are incredibly useful.

But they feel like conversations.

We started wondering about something that felt more like a place.

A room rather than a feed

There's a difference between sending somebody a photograph and putting it somewhere you share together.

It's a surprisingly difficult distinction to explain because, technically, you can already do most of the things we're talking about.

You can create a group chat.

You can make a private Facebook group.

You can create a shared photo album.

You can probably assemble a fairly convincing approximation of the nook using six existing apps and a spreadsheet if you're sufficiently determined.

But that's not really the point.

We want somewhere that starts with a different assumption.

When Arrah posts something publicly, she's making a decision to share it with an audience.

When I do the same, so am I.

Inside the nook, we want the assumption to be smaller.

These are my people.

This is our space.

Here's what happened today.

The ordinary stuff matters

The more we've thought about this, the more we've realised that we're interested in fairly boring things.

Not boring to us.

Just boring to almost everybody else.

What someone cooked.

A photograph from someone's afternoon.

Something funny the cat did.

A birthday.

A plan for next weekend.

A photograph nobody spent fifteen minutes choosing from twenty-three almost identical photographs.

The sort of things families and friends have always shared with each other.

Those things don't need to perform.

Nobody needs to wonder whether they're worth posting. There doesn't need to be an audience waiting for them.

They just need somewhere to live.

That's the bit we keep coming back to.

Public isn't the enemy

We're not building the nook because we want to disappear from public social media.

Quite the opposite.

Arrah and I will continue making things and sharing parts of our lives publicly. We enjoy doing it. There are people we've come to know through that audience who we would never have encountered otherwise.

Public spaces are good at that.

But your audience and your closest people aren't the same thing.

One doesn't need to replace the other.

You can enjoy walking into a busy pub full of interesting people and still want to go home afterwards.

We're interested in building the home.

So we're building one

We're still quite early.

There are parts of the nook that exist. There are parts currently represented by boxes on a screen. There are parts that currently exist mainly as conversations between Arrah and me, usually while one of us is supposed to be doing something else.

And there are questions we haven't answered yet.

That's one of the reasons we're writing this journal.

We want to talk about what we're building while we're building it, rather than appearing one day with a finished app and a carefully polished story about how every decision was obvious from the beginning.

It isn't.

We're figuring it out.

But the idea underneath it has remained surprisingly simple.

We wanted somewhere that felt like ours.

We suspect other people might want that too.