Scott Murray
@scott

vis.social is an open social platform for creative people. We first opened the doors in January 2018, and within 24 hours we had nearly 200 members. One month later, we tripled in size to to 630, and now — a year and a half into this experiment — we have 5,000 people on the platform. We hope you'll join us!

What makes vis.social “open” is that we use Mastodon, which is free, open-source, decentralized, and ad-free software. Technically, vis.social is a single node (or “instance”) in the larger Mastodon network (or “fediverse”). I know 🙄 and I promise it's much friendlier than it sounds!

Anyway, our node connects to all of the other nodes. So you can join us as @<yourname@vis.social> and you can interact with anyone else across the network on any other Mastodon instance — just as you select an email provider, but that provider can send and receive emails to and from all the other providers. (Be warned: This is way cooler than email.)

Why not see for yourself what's happening now on vis.social and see who's there?

Hi, by the way. I'm Scott. My background is in design, data, visualization, and creative coding, and that was the initial focus of vis.social. I wanted a friendly place to share work and receive constructive feedback. And since we launched, that's mostly what vis.social has become, although now lots of creative people across a range of fields participate.

No one makes any money from this effort, yet the service incurs some periodic costs. My goal is to not lose money. 😅

Current expenses

• €540 EUR per year (about $610 USD)
• $33 USD per year to register the cool domain name

I'd recommend a small donation, say $1 per month. Like I said, I'm not trying to make money here. But the more people we have contributing small amounts, the more ownership you'll feel over the platform.

Thank you for your consideration and support! See you on vis.social. 🙂