gistfile1.txt

Right this moment I am sitting on my computer, one window open to this article the other looking at a stream of moving faces. Faces coming from users all over the world. One is in Arizona, another in San Francisco, a third in Amsterdam, and two in the same room in Toronto. Every couple of seconds a new message pops in, and along with it a new face.  They are designers, programmers, musicians, students, and pets. The website is chat.meatspac.es, and I have been fascinated with it since October of last year when one of my friends sent me the link while I was goofing off at work. I couldn't look away, “who are all these people?” I thought. I was hooked. Two weeks later I was heading to a bar to meet someone who I had only seen as an animated gif. Ten months later and I had met over 50 people who had previously been only looping images to me.

The website was made as a collaboration between two mozillans, Jen Fong and Sole _____, and is a chat room where instead of having an account or a user name, your identity is whatever happens in front of your webcam in the 2 seconds after you hit enter on your keyboard. That's it. One room where every message is public, but with the option to mute users who you don't like. 
For me it was immediately fascinating. The GIFs provided a medium for people to playfully interact, to really emote in a way text chat would never allow, while at the same time still allowing users to control their own image. Unlike the always on forms of video transfer that we've become used to (google hangouts, skype, and the rest) Meatspace plays on your terms. You don't have to worry that people are watching you adjust your clothes, or check your teeth, or pick your nose, because they can only see what you choose to broadcast. The website stores the last 10 minutes of conversation or 30 messages, so it's not required that you watch intently at all times.

For the first few weeks I could hardly take my eyes off of the chat. I watched as it progressed from a crowd of startled newcomers into something resembling a community. Within the first week users realized that they lived in the same cities and went out to meet web strangers. The first regular and recognizable user was a LA native who we dubbed 'weedbro' for his propensity to smoke marijuana publicly. Styled off of his moniker every new regular user was named something-bro. I was orangehairbro for a brief moment, and we had londonbro, makerbro, and of course creatorbro. It provided an amazing window into people's lives. What's important to note here is that to begin with there was no language for communication. People did what came naturally via the platform and their interactions on it. Instead, very quickly, we defined this set of social norms for ourselves. Newcomers were newbros, people who refused to show their faces were muted or ignored. People were welcoming and warm, but it was rare to share deeply, or be too repetitive or selfish with your messages. While some people, purposely or not, challenged these norms most conformed. Whether this is due to the self-styled norms being as tyrannical as those chosen in most everyday interactions, or if people merely enjoyed it more is unclear and possibly unimportant. What's more important is possibly why it became such a large part of our lives.

For me meatspace was an escape from a job I found unengaging, and lacking social network in the city I had just moved to. I got the sense that for others it filled a similar role. During work hours the insides of countless offices could be seen, while at night there'd be an assortment of messy kitchens, bedroom walls, and dark bars. It quickly became a community, a place for people to vent, gush, or otherwise share with people who had no choice but to listen if they wanted to participate. It was a zone of constant validation and frequent play. But it wasn't until months later when I met creatorbro, Jen Fong or Edna Piranha (as she goes by online), that it clicked. Meatspace for me was an escape, and it was for everyone else as well. I didn't know it when I first started using it, but the people who chose to stick around each had their own share of personal drama or trauma that meatspace helped them forget. Weedbro was on his 2nd job in as many months and needed a space that didn't have the stress that work did. Others had gone through break-ups, divorces, moves, or other major life changes. Together, like the island of damaged toys we clung together and bonded. Enough so that when a few months later one regular user suggested that we all travel to Portland to meet up it was a no-brainer.

But why did everyone choose to trust this website in the first place? Social media, as that term is used commonly, has never been better. We have a large number of exceptionally strong websites that allow us to communicate, from twitter to facebook we are surrounded by friends and easy communication. But these services have begun to become known as 'the silos', large monolithic instances, one-size-fits-all solutions for social interaction. We feel pressured, nay, bullied by the weight and size of our social graphs that use these services to use them as well. By now nearly everyone has wondered if they'd be happier without constantly browsing their facebook wall for often needless updates of their friend's day to day lives, but the fear of missing out is too much to ever try (without a serious amount of inner turmoil). We feel literally trapped by these 'services', the torrent of our high school, college, and local friends updates weigh us down like a yoke. That's why the flight to pop-up services like Meatspace (or more recently tilde.club) doesn't surprise me. The ability to interact, pleasantly, with true strangers as opposed to past friends or acquaintances, lifts so much of the burden that encumbers our interaction with the mainstream social platforms. Here you may be judged, but not by people that can effect your job or day-to-day life. You can dance like nobody is watching.

The other point of conflict taken with 'the silos' is that we have no control over them. For facebook our personal lives and updates are the content that drives traffic to the site. Our attention, and to a lesser degree the portfolio of our interests, is then mined to sell advertising to us. It's the same scheme as a newspaper, except that we're writing the stories for them. On top of that the content we create and the information we share is stored on these siloed servers with terms of use that are meant to protect the platforms from litigation, not us from embarrassment or harm. This, understandably, makes a lot of users uncomfortable. Despite repeated attempts by facebook users to band together to influence decisions about the platform (if this page gets 100,000 users facebook will switch back to the old UI) Facebook (and the rest) remain a dictatorship not a democracy.

Jen, on the other hand, made meatspace out of curiosity, as a weird experiment when she was bored at work. Why not let it continue to be something for people like her. For her there was never the thought, as so often happens with software projects now, to turn it into a start-up or an otherwise for profit business. Instead Jen is a fervent believer in the Open Source ethos. From the beginning she had the code for the site available on github for people to inspect, edit, and integrate with. Not only did this give users a sense of ownership (if Jen ever dramatically changed the site, we could simply host an older version on our own and use that) but also the chance to interact with the platform itself, not just the other users. Due to Jen presenting it at a number of tech conferences as a proof of concept, many of the initial users were programmers themselves. For them if there was a feature they felt they could improve or something they felt they could add the solution was only a pull request away (assuming Jen gave it her stamp of approval). Unlike with facebook here you could hand in the solution along with the complaint.

Alternately you could build on top of the platform. Since it's guts were sitting exposed on github, it was simple to make any number of added features on the user side. Within the first few months people had made browser toolbars that did anything from sending your messages with a delay (so you could take your gif from further away from your keyboard) to tell you which gifs belonged to which users (useful for when people were chatting from poorly lit rooms). These together lent to the sense of community ownership. Users could craft the site in their own image either from the server or user side.



Despite the easy of extensibility there are still many limitations inherent in the format that can't be overcome. For one there's no way to know how many people are watching without participating, and no easy way to store messages that get sent when you're not logged in. The service doesn't scale, since there's only one channel and the same amount of space for 5 users as 50 it becomes nearly impossible to follow the conversation when a high number of users are talking. 

A month ago Jen passed control of Meatspace over to two of the more dedicated members of the community, and has gone on to work on a new project: rvlvvr. Like meatspace it's a distributed, encrypted, messaging platform that's meant to move users away from their reliance on the megalithic social networks. According to Jen she just wants to keep meeting strange people on the internet, but it seems that if the success of Meatspace, Ello, and Tilde club are any indication many more will follow her lead.