I'm Asim. I'm an engineer who's been hacking on an open source project called Micro for the past eight years (https://micro.dev). In that time I've done a lot of things, all Dev related but ultimately most of my career was spent working on platforms for consumer products. After many attempts I've decided the path forward is to focus on building something that solves my own problem. Micro Chat is a solution to some of the social media problems I've been having.
What I've been looking for most of my life is a community. A place to belong. I scoured the internet for that with strangers. But I think that's wrong. The public forums are also the wrong place to find that connection. What we need to do is focus on smaller communities starting with real connections. We need to strip away a lot of the addictive behaviours and issues created by social media. I think things like hackernews are great because it's very simple text based, with no notification and centers around conversations about topics of interest. I think that's how group chat should also be. The difference here is, I want a place to build small private communities e.g micro communities. Most real groups lose their value beyond a certain size. For me that's around 20 people. As an introvert I really care about strong connections with a handful of people. Unfortunately those real world connections are now spread globally as people moved away and while we have private slacks or WhatsApp grojps to stay in touch it just feels like the wrong setup for that. If anything I want to consolidate it into one place.
Anyway I'm sharing this now to get some feedback. I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.