Sharing without Social
The platforms that were supposed to keep us connected to the people we care about have spent the last fifteen years getting worse at exactly that job.
I don't mean this in the abstract, "kids these days" sense. I mean it mechanically. Facebook used to show me what your actual friends posted, in chronological order. Now it shows Reels from accounts you've never heard of and group posts from communities I joined in 2012 and forgot about. Instagram works the same way. Twitter - yes, I'm still calling it that - is a firehose of strangers arguing. LinkedIn turned into a place where people post like they're auditioning for a TED talk. The group chat, which is what most of us defaulted to when the feeds got bad, has its own problems: it's noisy, it's exhausting to keep up with, and adding a tenth person makes it ten times worse, not 1.1 times worse. Oh also, there is that lurker in the chat that never says anything making you forget they are even there until they mention something to you shocking you as to how they knew that.
What every one of these platforms has in common is that the connection between you and the people you actually care about has been intermediated by something that doesn't share your interests. The algorithm wants engagement. The group chat wants your attention right now. Neither of them wants what most people want, which is a low-effort way to know how the people they care about are doing.
There used to be a thing that did this well. The annual holiday letter. The round-robin family email. The mimeographed newsletter your aunt sent out to the extended family every couple of months. They were unglamorous and a little corny, but they worked. Everyone wrote a short update. Someone collected them. The whole thing went out to a fixed list of people who had chosen to be on it. No algorithm, no feed, no metrics, no strangers, no advertising. You read it, you knew how everyone was doing, and you went on with your life.
I've been thinking about this format for a long time, and the longer I thought about it, the more I became convinced it's actually the right shape for staying in touch with a defined group of people. Most of what social platforms have added to this basic idea has subtracted value, not added it. The performative element is bad. The infinite scroll is bad. The ranking is bad. The cross-pollination with strangers is bad. The "engagement" is bad. What's actually good - knowing how your people are doing - has been buried under everything else.
That's what TogetherLetters is. A group of people - your family, your college friends, your team, your investor circle, your old neighborhood, whoever - agree on a cadence. Every cycle, each person writes a short update. There's a character limit, because brevity is a feature. The platform stitches the responses together into a single newsletter and sends it to everyone in the group. That's it. There's no feed. There's no algorithm. There's no public profile. The only people who see your update are the people you've chosen to share it with.
My co-founder, Adam Walker, and I built TogetherLetters a little over four years ago because we wanted to use it. That has been the pattern for most of the things I've built that turned out to matter. I keep coming back to the idea that the internet was at its best when it was full of small, specific tools that did one thing well, and that a lot of what feels broken about the modern web is the result of every product trying to be a platform, every platform trying to be a feed, and every feed trying to maximize the amount of time you spend inside it. I don't want a feed. I want to know how my people are doing without having to do social media to find out.
Atlanta has a long history of building this kind of practical, get-out-of-your-way technology, and I'm proud that TogetherLetters is being built here. We're a small team. The product is intentionally narrow. The business model is straightforward: people who want this pay for it, and the price is low enough that it's an obvious yes for the groups that want it.
We're launching on Product Hunt today. If you've ever felt the gap I'm describing - that you've quietly lost track of people you actually care about because the platforms that were supposed to keep you connected stopped doing that - take a look. The link is here and we'll be in the comments on Product Hunt all day.
The thing the old holiday letter understood is that you don't need a platform to stay in touch with the people who matter to you. You just need a way for everyone to write a little, send it to the same place, and trust that it'll get to where it needs to go. That's worth bringing back.