Because I don't want my life to be too exposed.
Because what I do is my business.
Because I don't invite someone I just met to dinner: I like to get to know people before going further.
Because I like to interact with people from different backgrounds, not only with people who look like me and who are chosen for me.
Because I want to be myself, without any pressure or image of an ideal, and to be able to display my ideas and opinions without fearing that they will be censored or that I will be judged by my peers.
Because I enjoy confronting myself with new things, and not being constantly fed with the things I already know I like, or the ideas I think I already have.
Because I don't understand why my calculator application would want to be granted access to my microphone or my location.
Because, as you will have understood, I don't share Mark Zuckerberg's vision "Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology".
Technology at the service of social connection is not only dedicated to social networks. Telecommunications or transportation have largely contributed to bring people together. I can't imagine that today the goal of a social network can only be to anchor the physical distance between people. This is forgetting our nature, and denying our needs.
Many social networks are the subject of scandals. They disturbed the collective behaviors which make the stability of our societies. From the diffusion of an idealized image of oneself and what it generates, from the permanent solicitations that come to disrupt the course of our day and our social interaction in normal life, from the algorithms that only feed us what we already like or think without allowing us to go to discover the otherness and to go beyond the cleavages, to the monetization of our intimacy in the name of the gratuity or of our safety. The examples are numerous and well-known. They are in the public debate and it is useless to list them all.
This is where the challenge for social technologies lies: succeeding in offering a technological environment that allows us to have social relationships of the same quality as what we enjoy in normal life, while limiting the loss of connection with reality.
To meet people by chance, even outside one's own community. To take the time to discover the other person and who they really are before granting access to our home, or hanging up the phone to abruptly. To assert oneself as an individual, far from the image that one may build to please that or this community. To have contradictory debates that are not limited to telegraphic lines, sometimes more written than thought, written between two subways. And all those things that make human relations something special, something not robotic.
It is with this state of mind that I made the conceptualization choices for Yermat. Nothing will replace the real world and I don't pretend it is the solution, but I propose it. I'm curious about the use that will be made of it and impatient to read the feedbacks that will enable us to make it better.
A social network only lives because users are present: if you like its concept, I invite you to spread it. My budget is very limited and I have to work on it: I don't doubt that there will be many bugs or that the servers will get hot.
I hope you'll meet some nice people and make nice discoveries.
Sandokan