People use the web to find each other and communicate. But in 2024, our online social worlds are disintegrating.
Occasionally, a noble community manager steps up to actively cultivate an open meetup, subreddit or mailing list so that it’s both (a) high quality and (b) grows beyond the limits of any one person’s social group.
But this is expensive, time-consuming and rare.
What if there was an easy way to find and message people in a targeted, private way, without needing prior knowledge of who they are?
We’re building Speakeasy so that you can privately find and message your undiscovered peers.
Speakeasies are a special new type of private space on the web that you can join - not because you’re invited - but because you’re already qualified.
Lots of Speakeasies are theoretically possible:
Which Speakeasies will you join, and who will you connect with?
Every day, you travel the web, and leave a digital footprint.
In 2024, your digital footprint is very comprehensive. Normally you’d need permission from external platforms to share this information, but no longer. Thanks to new progress in advanced cryptography, you can discreetly share information about yourself, without relying on big tech companies.
This lets us create private groups to connect strangers who have lots in common.
Speakeasy is designed to make it easy.
Disintermediating technologies like cryptography make the web feel really different, and it takes some getting used to. We are hurtling towards the final, universal API.
A Speakeasy is a new kind of space on the web that’s never existed before.
Speakeasies introduce the notion of “walls” to the internet, and therefore extend cyberspace with locality. In physical space, we’ve always relied on locality as an invaluable way to structure human communication, and now we’re adding it to the web.
The result will indeed feel like a web, but a decentralised web of agents rather than a web of sites.