Welcome to Sane’s Monthly Roundup edition #1. In these newsletters, we’ll be sharing a public update of what’s been happening on Sane lately and how we’re thinking through product. Read on at your own risk. 😉
We’ve begun softly launching our private beta over the past month, slowly inviting people to discover this place we’re building and to see how they can create on Sane. Spaces have been made about soups and stews, Simone Weil, and post individualism — and this is just the beginning!
What we’ve been up to
Our aim is to build an integrated web for ideas — a social playground for creativity and self-expression. For us, this means a tool that enables you not just to consume and curate, but to create. And while Sane’s north star is a full-suite experience that seamlessly connects discovering, sharing, and creating ideas, our first focus is on the latter: to make the process of building spaces on Sane feel as magical as possible.
Since our soft launch, we’ve been polishing up the interface, squashing bugs and working on smoothing out interactions. Our next focus will be to enable users to easily collect inspiration from around the web into their spaces. We’re doing this with two new features: the basket and a Chrome extension:
The extension will allow you to grab whatever you find interesting anywhere on the internet, and easily bring it into Sane.
The basket compliments this as your private ‘notebook’ for content saved either from the web (v1), and from within Sane (coming later). We’re thinking of it both as a bookmark library and a notebook for quick captured ideas — a sort of temporary draft folder from which you can easily bring content to your spaces.
Will be sharing more on this soon!
Meet Linda!
As a part of these roundups, we’d like to introduce you to some of our early users — starting with the wonderful Linda Vinod. I asked Linda to share some of her ideas around the internet, Sane, and how she relates with the (digital) world around her.
Who are you and what do you care about?
I had a cross-cultural childhood so I never stayed in one place long enough to call it home. My environments changed more often than the seasons. Not having the stability needed to familiarise myself with my surroundings led to the development of a sensemaking process that relied on capturing something interesting or intriguing from a specific environment and matching it with findings from other environments until I started noticing patterns.
My first few attempts at trying to belong in new groups were based on these patterns. Something about having to try felt off. From a place of absolute loneliness, I started crafting community experiences to help people belong without having to adjust how they behaved in different social environments. The realisation that people living in geographical regions with low density of serendipity don't have the luxury to make this choice is leading me to explore experimental community building methods that are centered around helping them increase their agency.
What do you do in life?
I spend a lot of time birdwatching with my cat. I also build communities, lead cohort-based courses, and make contributions to digital spaces.
Describe your dream internet.
There's an increasing lack of openness and opportunities to maintain and care for digital spaces we find ourselves in. When we optimise for growth as residents or creators of these spaces, we opt in to the belief that the world runs on scarcity and we need to acquire as much as possible to stay at or get to a place where we can take comfort in illusionary abundance. That's most likely to fast track our digital spaces to becoming uninhabitable.
I want more of us to choose the joy of collaboratively nurturing malleable spaces that aspire for smallness — where we're incentivised to fall down rabbit holes with a small number of people and make meaningful discoveries and memories.
How would you describe Sane and your first experiences with it?
Sane is spacious in a way that feels liberating, not paralysing. I like how the early believers of Sane get to define the experience and the team weaves individual experiences together to add layers to the potential of what's being built here.
Since the first experience, being on Sane has been closer to the depth of experiences had in real life than online — every space feels like a museum visit and every hidden feature you serendipitously discover makes your day a little bit brighter.
What do you like to use Sane for?
To go on adventures around the internet and come back to Sane as the home base where I unpack my discoveries and make sense of how things that may seem unrelated on the surface level relate to each other.
How do you see Sane evolving in the future?
A space where everything you craft is meant to make its way to someone else. When it does, they may leave their fingerprint on your creation or take a piece of it to form something of their own. They might even reach out from their corner of the sane new world to yours in hopes of joining forces to create something magical together.
What would you like to see more of on Sane and the wider internet?
Better incentive design that enables people beyond your immediate social sphere whose lives are led by circumstances to have the resources they'd need to help shape the future of the internet
Hidden features to delight users upon discovery (without having to schedule a demo or subscribe to product updates)
Keep prioritising community care and curiosity
Not to be watched by so many strangers
Could you share some of the spaces you’ve created?
Try Sane and have a chat with us!
Book a slot to chat with us here to jump the waitlist and tell us about your internet dreams ❤️