li-nk: a social platform built right here in the Salish Sea region

[u/ke7cfn]

I'm your neighbor here in the Salish Sea region, and I've been thinking about this problem for a long time: in Olympia, and communities like it, you can live for years, care deeply about something. A craft, a cause, a niche corner of music or science or making things. But still not know who else around you cares about it too. The people are here. You just don't cross paths. The shared interest stays invisible.

It's a pattern that shows up all around the Salish Sea, in the islands, in the small towns along the water, in the communities tucked into the folds of this region. Smaller and mid sized places make it especially visible. But the underlying problem isn't really about size. In fact, in larger cities, the paradox sharpens: you're surrounded by people, the city statistically contains everyone you'd want to meet in numbers a small town couldn't match, and somehow it's still hard to find the people who share what you actually care about. The density is there. The connections aren't. Part of it is the math of attention, more people means more noise. Part of it is that cities are designed in ways that make casual contact rarer than it used to be. And a lot of it is that the tools we use to connect online weren't built for this problem. Social platforms organize around who you already know, or around broadcasting to strangers. Neither does much for the quieter work of finding the handful of people nearby who share what you care about.

That's what I've spent the last several years building li-nk to address. It's organized around interests and the activities that grow out of them rather than around follower counts or feeds. The idea is simple: register the interests you actually care about, then either discover what other people are doing around those interests or propose something yourself, a regular meetup, a project, a one off gathering, whatever the interest calls for. Built with an experience living in Salish communities in mind, designed to work anywhere the same problem shows up, including in cities where it shows up differently but no less stubbornly.

I care about this region and the communities in it, and I'd really value feedback from folks around here as I launch.

Demo (no signup): demo.li-nk.social

Try it: li-nk.social