Note
Notes from Superhuge
16.07.26Published
The group is the missing object on the internet
The internet knows what a person is. It knows what a post is. It still has a fuzzy idea of the group.
- network states
- groups
- social software
- Selfso
Say five people decide to turn an empty patch of ground into a garden.
Online, this becomes a group chat, a shared note, a calendar invite, a payment link and a folder full of photographs. Every part has an address. The group does not.
That seems strange. The garden is barely there and already the internet can see it better than the people making it together.
01 / Internet
The internet is very good at individuals
I have a profile. So do you. A thought becomes a post. A photograph gets a page. A file gets a link. A payment gets a receipt. These are all things software understands.
The same is true for companies. They can have a name, an address, members, money and a history that survives the people currently looking at the screen.
Somewhere between the person and the company is the form most of us use every day: a few people trying to do something together. The internet usually represents them as a list of names above a stream of messages.
02 / Group
A group chat is the wrong object
The chat is useful. It is also a terrible stand-in for the group. Important things move upwards until nobody can find them. People leave. New people arrive with no idea why Sunday became Saturday.
Move the garden chat from WhatsApp to Signal and it remains the same group. Stop chatting for a week and it still exists. The group lives in the people, their relationships, what they know, what they share and the thing they are trying to make happen.
The messages belong to the group. The group does not belong to the messages.
In real life this is obvious. Online, the group itself is mostly missing.
03 / Primitive
What if the group had one address?
Imagine the group as a proper internet object: a living place that knows who is there, why they came, what is happening and what the group already learned.
Its conversations, pages, files, events and actions could still use different tools. They would simply belong to the same thing. A person could join the group instead of first having to understand its pile of apps.
The group could carry context from one tool to another. It could remember decisions. It could make some things public and keep other things inside. It could exist on the internet before it needs to become a company, foundation or formal organisation.
One shared thing
The internet can see the fragments. The group is what makes them belong together.
Familiar internet objects
- Person
- Post
- Chat
- File
- Event
The missing object
Group
- People
- Context
- Memory
- Activity
- Resources
- Direction
This sounds like a small shift in software. I think it is a large shift in what the internet is able to see.
04 / Optimism
This is what I borrow from network states
What I like about network-state thinking is its confidence in the online group. People find one another around an idea. They become a community. They coordinate, pool resources, meet in places and make something real in the physical world.
Network states take that thought very far. I already find the starting point exciting: an online community can be the beginning of something in the world, with its own direction and momentum.
The garden group can stay small. Give it tools that can grow with it, take it seriously as a group, and see where the people take it.
05 / Selfso
Selfso is my small attempt
This is part of why I keep returning to Selfso. People want to help. Beautiful. Then the useful parts of the group scatter across talk, notes, files, plans and good intentions.
In Selfso, a Space is the thing they belong to. Talk, pages, actions and files can stay connected to the same people and the same context. It is a modest product idea with a larger belief underneath it: start with the group.
Software will never capture everything that makes a group real. It does not have to. It can start with the shared thing underneath the chat and help people take care of it.
06 / Object
A new primitive
The people making the garden may never form a company. They might only be together for one summer. The group is still real while it exists.
Give that group an address, memory and shape of its own, and new possibilities appear. It can understand itself. Later, it can find other groups, share what it knows and act in the world.
We have spent years making better posts. I want to see what happens when we make room for the group itself.
Tim