👋 Hello, and welcome to Lernabit! My name is Aaron Wright, and I am the founder of Lernabit. Lernabit is still in the very early stages, so I want to introduce myself and describe what I eventually want to achieve with Lernabit.
As an introvert, I'm well aware of how difficult it can be to make friends, especially since COVID shifted everything into the online world. Our social networks are online. We work online. Even dating is online now. All of this has made it very difficult to create real friendships. To make matters even more difficult, the growth of AI is putting people out of jobs altogether, eliminating yet another potential source of social connections.
If all of that isn't difficult enough, the problem is even worse for geeks, thinkers, and intellectuals. Being a geek myself, I know how frustrating it is when people say that if you want to make friends, then you need to get out and join some activities. What those people don't understand is that there aren't any activities for people like us.
Well, now there is.
My goal is to provide a platform for people like you and me to build real connections through experiences that engage our minds. I want to make it clear that Lernabit is not a social media app. It is not being engineered as another app that encourages doomscrolling to harvest personal data. Instead, it is being thoughtfully designed to encourage mindful activities that happen in the real world. By creating exciting hands-on activities in this manner, we can develop meaningful and genuine friendships in real life instead of the shallow "friendships" found on social media apps.
But just getting people together isn't enough. Speaking from experience, I know that even when activities become available, it can be difficult for people like us to make friends. It is hard to connect with people when we have exotic hobbies and obscure interests that most people don't care about. That's why Lernabit is being designed to help aggregate people based on shared interests, whether those interests are nature, literature, coding, or history. It will be a place where people with a particular interest can meet each other and explore those topics together.
But on the other hand, I also recognize that those of us with curious and open minds don't like to be sorted into silos based on our viewpoints the way social media apps do. We aren't afraid of hearing different points of view, and we even welcome opposing viewpoints as long as they provide us with some sort of enlightenment. For that reason, groups on Lernabit are being carefully chosen to organize people based on interests, not viewpoints. For example, on social media apps, you might find groups for far-right or far-left groups. On Lernabit, there would just be a single group for everyone with an interest in politics. Likewise, there wouldn't be a group for capitalism and a group for socialism; there would just be a single group for economics in general. With this group structure, people are organized by their interests, but it happens in a way that still exposes people to other points of view. I believe that by providing a way for people to learn about their interests together, Lernabit can help tone down some of the divisive viewpoints that have created so many problems in the world.
If this sounds interesting to you, be sure to check back soon for more updates on my progress!