Flotilla: The Anti-Discord

At first glance, Flotilla (https://flotilla.social) might look like just another dime-a-dozen Discord clone. In reality, there are two major things that set it apart.

First of all, Flotilla is built on nostr, the only protocol I know of that truly prioritizes digital sovereignty for its users. In addition to being FOSS and self-hostable, Flotilla's protocol-first approach makes interoperability between applications possible, and gives users credible exit through signed data and cryptographic identities.

Just as important, my reasons for building Flotilla go deeper than a profit motive, or even techno-optimism.

Over the last several years I've been reading deeply into media ecology — Marshall McLuhan, Jaques Ellul, Ivan Illich, James Carey, Romano Guardini — and I've come to the conclusion that digital communication technology has extended it's reach far beyond its healthy limits. Social media collapses context, displaces lived experience for the hyper-reality, and dissolves identity into profiles which are quantified and soulless.

I want a new form of social media that complements real life rather than extracting value from it. To do this, a digital platform must:

• Respect the identities that people bring to the product.
  Allow people to speak differently in different contexts.
• Nudge the user away from engaging digitally to engaging in the real world.
• Nurture community identity over time, rather than over space.

Flotilla provides many of the same features that people have come to expect from chat software — push notifications, chat, A/V calls, mobile apps, and more. However, these things are more often than not used as hooks to get you back into the app in order to... what was I doing again?

Flotilla takes a different approach. Notifications are opt-in, not opt-out. Content libraries provide a place for persistent community memory, so you don't have to resort to scrolling backward to find old conversations. You can turn off attention-catching images and gifs for a calmer experience. Start a forum thread to have a long, slow, thoughtful discussion instead of cramming everything into chat. Plan an event, post a classified, create a funding goal.

In short, Flotilla is built for people who do life together, not for strangers on the internet.