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ButterflyDreaming

A new free social media that is based on anonymous users sharing creation and hence identity

Once

upon a time,

Zhuangzi

dreamt he was

a butterfly —

fluttering freely,

unaware of being

Zhuangzi.

Then he woke.

And could not say:

was he a man

who had dreamt

of being a butterfly,

or a butterfly

now dreaming

of being a man?

— Zhuangzi, Ch. 2 (c. 4th c. BCE)

The documentation is divided into a number of pages as follows:—

In the ASPIRATIONS page we set the context of the problems of today's social media contrasting against their shortcomings and we introduce what are our own design priorities. In the PHILOSOPHY page we allow ourselves a little fanciful thinking that might deepen the above context and maybe fire off some associations in the reader. We then describe the more practical aspects of the design by envisaging how a typical USER JOURNEY will look once the site is constructed and open to the public. In order to proceed much further with the project we need support from others and how this is to be organised is discussed under the page PARTICIPATE. The next page TIMELINE describes how the work is actually progressing. The most challenging aspects of the project concern safety, health, and fairness; these and other issues are discussed on the ETHICS page. Readers of our site may want to know more exactly how things operate and there is a DETAILS page to answer some of these questions.

In practice it is a new kind of social media — somewhere between a relaxed chat, a piece of literature you wander through, and a gentle game. The philosophical architecture is there for those who want it. For others, it may be an interesting way to spend time with a stranger.

The site here was constructed with the help of Claude, Anthropic's AI. Some of its text is a little fanciful but we have let it be — the approach of ButterflyDreaming is towards associative thinking, so a little fancy does no harm ...