Why I'm making PixoChat

I wanted a place on my phone that was somewhere to go, not something to scroll. I could not find one, so I am building it.

Every app I open to talk to people I like also has an opinion about who else I should be looking at. There is a chat in there somewhere, but it sits under a feed, next to a number, behind a notification that is not from a friend. The chat is the thing I came for. Everything around it is the thing the app came for.

The internet used to be somewhere you went

You opened the computer. You sat down. You went to a page, or a room, or a friend's profile that they had decorated themselves. Then you got up and left, and the internet stayed where it was. It did not follow you into the kitchen.

Somewhere along the way that flipped. The internet stopped being a place you visited and became a stream that visits you. Software stopped believing you were a person with taste and started believing you were an audience to be served the right next thing. The feed, the metric, the recommendation, the notification that is really a tap on the shoulder from a company. None of it is evil. All of it adds up to a phone that is never quite yours.

Imagine it had gone the other way. I wrote about that other timeline in The internet was once a place. Short version: in that timeline the technology kept advancing, phones and networks and all, but the software kept the shape it started with: a small room, a few friends, something drawn by hand, and nothing in the middle deciding what you should see. PixoChat is what a chat app from that timeline looks like, arriving in ours.

What I'm building

It starts where PictoChat did, the drawing chat built into the Nintendo DS: a small group of friends, a small canvas. You draw, they draw back. A room holds the people who are in it and empties when they leave. In a room with your friends, nobody else is watching, and that is the feature.

That is where it starts, not where it ends. The idea is a place, in the old sense: somewhere you go, with your friends already in it, and things to do together once you are there. Rooms for the people you know. Small things to do together that grow over time, each one a reason to be there with someone rather than alone with a feed. What you have in it, you earned. Nothing gets you ahead by paying.

It is deliberately not a network in the sense that word has come to mean. Nobody is ranked and nothing is recommended. The people you meet in it are people who are actually there: your friends, whoever they bring, and whoever walked into the same room.

What I refused

No ads. No follower counts under your name. No tracking: there is no analytics library in the app, and I do not know how long you spend in it. No paying to get ahead. Nothing designed to keep you there. When your friends leave a room, it is empty, and the right thing to do is put your phone down.

Refusing those things costs something. It is why an app like this does not exist already: there is no business model in a place that wants you to leave when your friends do. I am making it anyway. It starts small on purpose.

What I want it to be

A place you go to on purpose, and leave. You open it because a friend showed up, not because a company wanted you back. You draw something, they draw something back, and you put your phone down feeling like you saw someone. If it does that for a handful of people, it is working. Everything PixoChat grows into has to keep passing that test.