> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://journal.nooksocial.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I don’t want 10,000 friends - URL: https://journal.nooksocial.co/i-dont-want-10-000-friends/ - Published: 2026-10-02T16:00:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T16:00:26.000Z - Author: Andrew Mills I don't think I know 10,000 people. I do, however, have thousands of people who follow what I do online. And I'm rather glad they do. Social media has brought people into my life who I would never otherwise have met. It's given me an audience for things I make, introduced me to interesting people and created opportunities that simply wouldn't have existed twenty years ago. There's something genuinely brilliant about being able to make something in your living room, put it on the internet and discover that somebody on the other side of the world cares about it. I don't want that to disappear. But I've been thinking about a different kind of connection. ## Not everyone is a friend That sounds harsher than I mean it. Someone can follow what I do, regularly watch something I make and even know quite a lot about my life without us actually knowing each other. That's not a bad relationship. It's just a different one. The internet has become remarkably good at this kind of connection. We can follow musicians, filmmakers, engineers, comedians, writers and complete strangers whose lives we find interesting. We can find communities around incredibly specific interests. We can share something with thousands of people almost instantly. I've benefited from all of that. But when I'm sharing something with my wife, my family or a handful of close friends, I want something different. I don't need an audience. I just need a room. ## The things that aren't content Most of life isn't particularly remarkable. The cat is asleep somewhere ridiculous. Someone cooked something that turned out surprisingly well. There's a photograph from a family gathering. Someone has some news. Someone else has a terrible joke. None of this needs thousands of views. And that's not because those moments aren't valuable. Their value comes from the people involved. A photograph can be completely uninteresting to almost everyone on Earth and incredibly important to five people. I've started wondering whether we've underestimated that distinction when designing social networks. Public social media is very good at answering: **What do I want to share with the world?** There's another question I'm interested in: **What do I want to share with my people?** ## Making the room smaller That's one of the ideas behind the nook. We're experimenting with what happens when you start with a small group rather than an audience. Not because having an audience is bad. Not because follower counts need to disappear from the internet. And certainly not because everybody should retreat into tiny private corners and never meet anyone new. The constraint just changes the kind of thing we're building. If you're not trying to reach thousands of people, going viral stops being particularly useful. If the people in the room already know each other, popularity matters less. And if something is being shared between twenty people rather than twenty thousand, perhaps the software around that conversation should behave differently too. That's where things start getting interesting. How big should these groups become? What happens when somebody leaves? How much control should the person sharing something have over where it goes? How do you help people stay connected without constantly demanding their attention? We're still working through those questions. ## Different rooms I've stopped thinking about this as choosing between public and private social media. They're different rooms. Sometimes I want to publish something and have thousands of people see it. Sometimes I want to discover somebody I've never heard of. Sometimes I want to talk to people who share an obscure interest of mine. I like that version of the internet. But sometimes I just want to show a few people a photograph of the cat. That shouldn't require an audience. And increasingly, I think there's room on the internet for both.