fika

What is fika?

Fika is a Swedish tradition where you take time out of your day to socialize with friends, family, or colleagues over a cup of coffee or tea. It's a time to relax and enjoy the company of others.

But why "fika" for this product then? Well, names are important. They shed light on the invisible and lay the building blocks to create narratives upon. Let's talk how we got there.

The dark forest

One of those nelogisms is "Dark Forest", which was popularized on 2008 by Liu Cixin when publishing a book under the same name.

The "Dark Forest" is an hypothesis that tries to explain the reason why we haven't found alien life despite how likely it should be for it to exist (the Fermi Paradox). It does it through a metaphor: in a dark forest, full of hostile predators, one wouldn't make themselves known to others, as it would mean certain death.

On 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, wrote an essay that brought this term to the tech world. He argued that the internet is slowly becoming a dark forest, where people are afraid to share their thoughts and ideas, as they might be attacked by trolls or other predatory actors.

Four days later, Venkatesh Rao followed up with another article that went deeper into the topic. In this article, he used one of his usual 2x2 matrixes to coin a new term: The cozy web. The cozy web is the antithesis of the dark forest. It's a place where people can share their thoughts and ideas without fear of being attacked. It is by nature private, and it's not indexed by search engines.

The cozy web

On 2023, Maggie Appleton published popularized the cozy web even further by publishing a beautiful infographic that illustrated the different layers of the internet, from the dark web (completely anonymous) to the dark forest (completely public). In between the dark extremes, life is thriving on semi-public or private spaces, where people can share their thoughts and ideas without fear of being attacked.

I took inspiration from Maggie's work and decided to create a product that would represent that first layer between the dark forest and the cozy web.

I imagined a little bar in the middle of the dark forest, where animals would come together and share the stories they've found in the woods. A place where they could have a break from predators and cozy up.

Hence, fika.

Sharing stories

Sharing stories has changed a lot over the years. It started with the blogosphere (how long has it been since you heard that word?) and the RSS protocol. But after the symbolic death of Google Reader, it quickly moved towards social media and messaging apps.

I'm bringing back the old ways of sharing without trying to compete against algorithmic engagement. A corner of the internet for people producing and consuming long-form content.

To fulfill that vision, I'm bundling 3 products into one:

I've made the most minimalistic version of each one of those products, but they make sense together as a whole. Stitched up by the RSS protocol.

A bookmark manager

When bookmarking stories, fika detects and recommends you to subscribe to the feed if one is available. Despite RSS readers not being a thing, they are still surprisingly abundant. From my own ~5k bookmarks, I found almost 1k feeds to subscribe to.

An RSS Reader

When you subscribe to a feed, fika suggests you stories to bookmark. It also sends you a digest to your email so you don't need to check the app (or worse, twitter) every day.

An blog/newsletter platform

People usually share two kinds of content on the internet: stories they find and stories they write.

Some people specialize in "curating". They consume a lot of content and can sift the signal from the noise. Fika offers you the option to share your bookmarks publicly.

Other people specialize in "writing". They produce content that is worth sharing. Fika offers you the option to write your own posts.

You can create your own blog to share both kinds of content.