2020 to 2023 · A look back from the founder
A safe place to bee social. No ads, no algorithm, no friends lists, no likes. Just people sharing the things that unite them. This is why I built it, what I learned, and where the road goes from here.
Why I started it
I had spent close to ten years building things on the web, and the longer I looked at social media the less I liked what I was looking at. Negativity everywhere. Feeds engineered to keep you scrolling. Companies quietly harvesting everything about you, and about your kids, so they could sell it to somebody else. Early in 2020, a few months before my son was born, I had enough. I went to work for months researching and building something different.
The need felt obvious to me. Families and friends wanted a place to share the moments that actually matter, engagements, weddings, graduations, a newborn's first weeks, with the people who actually care. Not with an audience. Not as feed fodder. And they wanted to do it without handing over their data as the price of admission.
We're not a social media platform. We're just a safe place for you to bee social.
So that is what we built. BuzzyGroups went live in August 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, at a moment when it felt like the country badly needed somewhere calm to talk. The concept was simple: give everyone a chance for their voice to be heard, so people can speak their minds respectfully and share their lives without judgement. The vision was bigger than the product, and I still believe in it: a safe place for humankind to focus on everything that unites us.
What we built
Every choice below was a reaction to something I had watched go wrong somewhere else. Some of them made growth harder. All of them made the place better.
We didn't want a popularity contest, or the pressure to post the best picture. You were there because of what you shared, not who you collected.
Every group was request-to-join and approved by a leader. A family group stayed a family group.
We brought back plain old commenting. Comments were private to the poster by default so they couldn't become the new likes.
Plenty of platforms already competed for your attention every second. Ours waited until you felt like checking in.
We never sold data and we never ran ads. Early adopters were promised free accounts forever, and the plan was to earn our keep with paid memberships instead.
Two taps to add it to your phone, with no invasive permissions to your contacts, photos, or location.
In March 2021 BuzzyGroups was awarded the Certified Civil designation by the Worldwide Civility Council for fostering civility and civil dialogue. For a two-person team, that meant a great deal.
What I learned
Some of these are about running a startup. Most of them are about what the last few years have taught me regarding our memories, our data, and the road ahead.
Building it is one thing. Getting the world to move in is another thing entirely. A social space is only worth as much as the people already inside it, and the incumbents had a decade's head start and marketing budgets bigger than our revenue would ever be. We reached the people we loved. We did not reach the world, and I have made my peace with that.
When we did our research in 2020, "adless, algorithmless, privacy-centric, and paid for by members instead of advertisers" was a contrarian pitch. Within a couple of years, some of the biggest companies on earth were shipping exactly those concepts: paid subscriptions, chronological feeds, privacy as a headline feature. I don't think they were reading our FAQ. I think the need was real and we saw it early. Either way, we are proud of it, and glad those ideas ended up serving the purpose they were meant to serve.
The thing families actually wanted never went away: an "offline" social experience, an invite-only place where the only audience is the people you chose. So we built a new hive. It is completely private, invite only, by design. No sign-up page, no discovery, no public anything.
It turns out that sheltering is not the same as hiding. AI has been an amazing part of society already, and it will keep producing breakthroughs in every field of science, mathematics, and health. But unfettered, unbridled access to our lives by a society we cannot fully trust raises real moral and ethical questions about what people might do with our data, especially without our permission. I sure as hell don't want someone using my likeness, my voice, or my image to manipulate my family and friends.
It will only become more difficult to distinguish what is real from what was generated. An unaltered photo from years ago may end up looking less convincing than the altered one sitting next to it. What's a few pixels off here and there? Well, it could be the difference between remembering something that happened and remembering something that never did. It can alter how a whole family perceives an event.
That is the part that keeps me up at night. It isn't only that a technology could make us forget. It could quietly replace what we remember with something else, and do it well enough that nobody argues. Your originals, kept somewhere only your people can reach, are the antidote.
Used properly, the same technologies may help us cure, faster and more reliably, diseases that have plagued societies for generations. They could take real bites out of hunger and poverty. As a society we have never been better positioned to solve our hardest problems than we are today. When I look down the path as far as I can see, I see a big, bright, beautiful tomorrow. But if we are not careful, we can walk right back down the road we have been on before, and that one ends with the same problems we have now.
I keep coming back to a poem I have loved for a long time. Read it slowly. Then pick the path that leads to a better outcome, and go try to solve the hard problem.
Robert Frost, 1916
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The only way we will ever solve our greatest problems is by never, never giving up.
BuzzyGroups didn't become the next big thing. It became something smaller and, I think, more honest: a few years of a family's life, kept safe, in a place that never once tried to sell them. Every photo and every conversation from it lives on today in a private hive with the people who made them. That was always the point.
Thank you to everyone who posted, commented, and beelieved.
