Contents
This is a draft. Numbers marked † are proposals and may change before launch. Nothing in this document is an offer to sell anything or advice to buy anything. Section 13 lists the ways this can go wrong. Read it first if you are here for the token.
2. Where the idea came from
Over the last couple of years a new kind of social account appeared: the follower city. You follow the account and you become a resident of a small illustrated town. Your username goes on a house. The largest of these have well over 100,000 residents, with daily errands, jobs, an ID card office, a newspaper, and a mayor who posts announcements. People check in every day to see what got built and whether their name made the paper.
They work for reasons that have little to do with graphics:
- Joining costs nothing and takes one tap.
- You are a resident with a name on a door, which feels different from being a user with an account.
- New residents arrive on a schedule, so there is always something to wait for.
- The city has rituals: a paper, a radio station, small jobs, a town square.
- Things get built because residents asked for them.
They also have limits. Each one is tied to a single platform, a single language, and a single time zone. Residents own nothing; the house is a row in someone else's database. Real money only flows one way, as donations. And nobody outside can check the books.
Elsewhere keeps the first list and tries to fix the second.