Ev Williams (one of the creators of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium) on his new app, Mozi:
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.
Mozi claims to be a private social network that connects you to people you already know via your contacts list. This may seem a little counterintuitive, but here's a true example from my own life:
I lived in a small town called Oliva, Spain, from September through November, 2017. In the summer of 2018, when I was living in Culver City, CA, I saw a photo on social media of a friend I'd drifted apart from and hadn't seen in 20 years. That photo was taken in Gandia, Spain, in October, 2017. Gandia is the neighboring town to Oliva and my friend was staying just 2KM away from where I was living. In fact, in those months, while I was hiking through Orange Groves, we were closer to one another than we are when we're both home in Toronto.
Had Mozi existed back then — and we'd both been using it — we would have been alerted to each other's presence and been able to make plans to meet.
I'm not normally someone to evangelize for social media, but I do find the purpose of Mozi to be useful and am therefore giving it a shot. At the moment it's only available for iPhone (there's an Android waitlist) and it's pretty much pointless unless your contacts are on it, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see what happens.
