small networks
inprogress.works, cafes and highways, gardens and forests
In the depths of winter, I created inprogress.works as a reaction to the slow decline of social media. I had been thinking about it for a long time as every platform slowly got worse and worse. There was the Elon takeover of Twitter, the mimetic echo chamber of the creator economy1, the rise of short form video - all in the name of monetization and growth.
It would be easy to go offline but the internet had given so much to me. It allowed me to freely express myself and meet other people who felt the same. Part of identity formation is being perceived, and networked society despite all its ills allowed me to reinvent myself again and again. Through my website, Twitter, Bluesky, and random Instagram stories I posted I could mold my sense of self.
I remained because I believed in the internet’s ability for us to express ourselves sincerely and meet others. The manifestation of these beliefs was inprogress.works, a website for people to post their side projects on a weekly basis. More importantly, you wouldn’t be able to see others’ posts unless you posted yourself. I hoped the hyper-specificity and anti-influencer architecture would draw earnest people who shared my beliefs of 1) the creative act as a continual state of being and 2) interest in others’ work without traditional markers of legibility2. In short -
Website as a garden, revisited
Since launching inprogress.works I’ve had 30-40 ish weekly users, which far exceeded my expectation of maybe 5-6 people. This was the first time in my life I created an app that other people besides myself and my friends used.
Having users gave a whole new definition to maintenance. Sometimes people would make posts of gibberish just to get past the post wall and I’d delete them. Every week I was committed to fixing, pushing new features, and occasionally figuring out how to route the site to people who might enjoy it. I also made weekly email reminders where I would feature a “post of the week” and announce new functionality. It felt like I was gardening - watering plants, planting new seeds, pruning the weeds, and repairing fences3. The historical “gardens of the internet” - the digital hypertext wikis, literal replications of gardens, couldn’t compare to the weekly active maintenance inprogress.works took.
I was so attentive to inprogress.works for most of winter because it felt like I was given one shot. People visit your site once and decide whether they want to log in to check it out. They post once and decide if they want to keep on coming back. I wanted to keep on trying different things while I still could to make inprogress.works unfold closer and closer to my original wish. I wanted to help people find connection through the act of making.4
Spatial metaphors for online communities
I wouldn’t say that inprogress.works replaced Twitter and Instagram for me or it became a virtual gathering place for all the makers I knew. There’s some drop off after using it a bit, people get busy and documentation takes a lot of energy. Instagram and Twitter are still the public townsquares and inprogress.works is like the indie cafe that opened just down the street.
Like most niche social networks5, the friction from hyper-specificity is both helpful and harmful in getting the right people to come. And so, inprogress.works is probably destined to remain that size and scale forever. Even though the posting requirement focused on bi-directionality, it was hard to encourage people to invest in the other people they didn’t know and whose work was in the process of legibility (since it was focused on WIPs). Likes and Comments were used, but because the platform was so small the following feature didn’t get used much. It was more of a solo journaling app with the aspirations of becoming a large async multiplayer game.
The lack of cross-person engagement is expected to some degree, everyone had different disciplines and a weekly feed also meant you could miss someone’s work from the previous week that you might resonate with (although this could change with development). Part of me wonders if I had every maker in the world on inprogress.works, would it unfold differently?
How do I find you?
One of the interesting parts of micro-communities is how they are found. In the past Google was the great highway of the internet - there’s an infamous story of how Amazon was named that because the search ranking used to be in alphabetical order. Now search algorithms aren’t as simple and if someone were to find inprogress.works on Google I would have to play the Great Game of SEO (whatever that is).
In this website howdidyoufind.me it seems that discoverability these days is mostly through curated lists, which are then popularized through other lists or the social media algorithm. The story of inprogress.works is similar enough, I first asked a couple of friends to try it out, posted it on Twitter and Bluesky (Instagram historically is not good at getting random people to see your content unless you make a Reel, which I don’t want to do), and had a feature on Naive Weekly (thank you Kristoffer!).
Online social networks are reflections of the real world and small networks are partly a digital manifestation of the creator’s own social network6. Many of the creatives I knew who I had asked to try it out were from my time living in NYC and SF, densely populated cities with plenty of physical third spaces to bring people together. Meeting someone in real life didn’t rely on whether you had enough followers to break through the algorithm.
If I had lived back at home, it would’ve been much harder to get inprogress.works started and perhaps it would feel lonelier than a cafe, maybe a home in the mountains…
Finding light in the dark forest…
In 2019 or 2020, the term “Dark Forest” of the internet emerged in which major platforms were critiqued for being full of bots and trolls and it was much better to retreat into our own private discord servers. To retreat or to stay seems to be the eternal question.
Yancey Strickler, former co-founder of Kickstarter has been making a paywalled online community called the Dark Forest OS for likeminded people to retreat to a private server together. He acknowledged ironically enough, he had to post on Twitter to bring more awareness to his project. Whether we like it or not, most of the world wouldn’t be able to easily find our cozy parts of the internet. Backed by millions of venture funding and thousands of engineers, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok7 and Facebook are here to stay as the great highway connecting the world.
Is there light in the dark forest? There are more aligned alternatives like Bluesky, but a part of me wonders if we’re only creating a more insular internet. Most users on Bluesky are liberals who exited Twitter as protest, but then, how will the other side of the political spectrum be reached? Or perhaps, mainstream social platforms are already insular enough with how the algorithm works…
I’ve also seen more people building on top of the AT Protocol, a decentralized social network where you can share a single identity and be found across many different platforms. Users own their data and can move it at will. I wonder one day if it’ll reach mainstream, and what it would take to do so. My friend who used to work at BlueSky said many people didn’t get the fact it was built on top of AT Protocol, to them it seemed like any other social media website. Abstracting out the complexities made it more approachable, but I wonder if there’s a way for both to exist, for everyday people to feel empowered without needing to be “technical”.
As winter turns into spring into summer
The weather is growing warmer in NYC, and spending long days staring at my screen isn’t the most sustainable. I wonder if inprogress.works will soon fade into the background of people’s memory and gently decay with time. That being said, I don’t mind either way.
To me inprogress.works, like a garden, is subject to seasons and isn’t a place that someone needs to visit every day. I hope it can be a park or library for people to visit if they need a quiet, slower respite from their daily life - a reminder that things can exist as a labor of love. It certainly is that for me, a reminder that there are people out there who like to make things just because they believe in the act itself. It doesn’t matter if no one sees it, the tree fell and it made a sound.
A place just needs to be encountered once to be remembered.
Miscellaneous updates
The gap between my idea formation and actually finishing it has shortened from one year to months to weeks which means perhaps a new era of practice is coming!!
As you can see I am loving the footnotes in this blogpost, I am updating writing on connie.surf to be more conducive of references and asides…
I’ve been thinking about why my phone has been feeling weightier in my pocket. It might be from working remotely..
Still working on fixing my art / work / life balance and doing things in the margins of the hour (1 or 2 am…) I do think my life has changed a lot the last 2.5 years and I’m patiently waiting for the dust to settle
I’m holding a values based software event at the end of the month in brooklyn! I’ve been hosting 3x more than I usually do, and I still haven’t beat my fears around hosting yet (working on it!). That said, it is a manifestation of my hopes and dreams for technology and I feel very grateful to converge on it with others :^)
Finished reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang, trying to ease into reading again but get thrown off whenever I read a bad book, please send me recommendations!
Incredibly long post this time around but as always, shoot me a message if anything is of interest!
Thank you to Kasra for looking over a draft of this post and thank you to all the friends who tried inprogress.works and gave me feedback <3 I will probably say it a few more times but it makes me incredibly happy to see people post on there… I’m excited to see everyone’s creative practice unfolding!!
I won’t go into specifics here, but if you’re wondering why content is getting worse read this presentation which goes into detail on how to get viral
These aspects as core parts of my identity only solified when I first moved to sf and realized I really missed coworking with my friends, that making things was how I connected with others!
There are some features that are hard to test (ie onboarding, email automation, timezones) and ones that are easier to fix (UI issues).
All the decisions/improvements I made while building IPW could be a whole other blogpost itself but in the meantime if you’re curious I wrote parts of it up here
midnight.pub, 2000.town, cyberspace.online, goodsong.club, in these cases friction is in understanding what the point is of the website or just the criteria for participating
Some examples: 48, special.fish, synesthesia.club
I still remember when Tiktok was emerging to become a new social media force, every single youtube video ad was pushing it onto me, is that what it takes to reach people these days?
thank you for sharing so much of your thinking and thoughtfulness!!! and thank you for bringing people together :’)
This is so beautiful Connie, thank you for sharing more about your work