Hello 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? Well, coining new names is important. It sheds light on the invisible and lays the building blocks to create narratives upon. Let's talk how I got there.

The dark forest

One of these neologisms is "Dark Forest", which was popularized in 2008 by Liu Cixin when he published a book of the same name.

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

In 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 not indexed by search engines.

The cozy web

In 2023, Maggie Appleton further popularized the cozy web 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 in semi-public or private spaces, where people can share their thoughts and ideas without fear of being attacked.

Looking at Maggie's work I realized that I’m constantly moving information between the dark forest and the cozy web. I often consume content online, curate it, and share it in private communities on Telegram and Whatsapp. Many people live and thrive in that liminal space so I decided to create a product for us.

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 take 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 tragic 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 three products into one:

• A bookmark manager

• An RSS reader

• A blog/newsletter platform

I've made the most minimalistic version of each one of these 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 subscribing to the feed if one is available. Despite RSS readers not being a thing, they are still surprisingly abundant since most publishing platforms enable them by default. For instance, 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 for you 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

Besides consuming content, I wanted people to be able to contribute their own. Usually this comes in two forms:

• Someone else’s content: that’s the realm of “retweets”, social bookmarking, and other forms of curation.

• Your own original content: that’s the realm of “threads'“, blog posts and other forms of long-form content.

I built a very basic blog platform so people could write their own posts and share their bookmarks with the world under the same feed. This also closes the circle, since it allows people to follow each other like one would on a social network.

Closure

I hope you enjoy fika and find the ideas inspiring. Please don’t hesitate to sign up and see if this is something that would bring value to your life. It’s made with a lot of love.

Cheers, Pao