About Overstory
Overstory Social is a slow-motion social network. It is part indieweb blogging platform, part old-fashioned correspondence, part bioregional online third space.
One post a day
You get one post a day. Use it wisely to say something interesting. All posts land at the same time — when you run out of things to read, go away. There's no infinite scroll or discovery feed here. All discovery needs to be intentional, attention-based.
Attention, and what it builds
Pay attention to what you read here. Be thoughtful in what you share here. Post a lot about a subject, and that subject will coalesce into a shared space for everyone to talk about it. Form a club, which can be digital-only or have a shared physical space. Clubs provide more opportunities to write, if you are answering a call for posts.
Consent and trust
We believe in modeling consent relationships online: you cannot be followed, tagged, or otherwise interacted with without your consent. We are experimenting with crowdsourced web-of-trust moderation. You vouch for people you know. People who trust you will trust them, with trust following along a web. Bad behavior will cause revocation of trust.
Or just host your blog here
You can also just host your blog here, if you want to. The outward-facing surface of the Overstory is just that: paying supporters can host public content.
Membership
Membership in Overstory is free, on an invitation-only basis. Without an invitation, you can join the waiting list.
Overstory sells no ads, farms no content. Overstory is 100% member-supported. Membership goes directly towards supporting the work. There are three tiers:
- Free — free until we can't afford it anymore. Only one profile, no public-facing posts. Full writing and reading privileges — we will never gate authorship or participation on paid state. You can join and moderate as many clubs as you like, and every account — free included — carries one club sponsorship: enough to start a club, or keep one you love alive.
- Standard — support us with some money. You get 2 GB of storage for locally hosted images, three private profiles, one public-facing profile that can host blog posts, and one domain of your own to put in front of it. $5/month or $50/year. You can support up to 3 clubs.
- Plus — support us with more money. You get 5 GB of storage, up to ten private profiles, three of which can be public-facing, and three domains of your own (each pointed at a public profile or a club you sponsor). $10/month or $100/year. You can support up to 10 clubs.
How this was made
This work is the result of Eric's design: he proposed, tested and designed the concepts built here. The code, however, was written — under human supervision — by Claude Code. Gemini was used at times to provide feedback on architecture decisions.