Why we need the dark forest
MARCH 14TH, 2026
This week we're reflecting on how much the dark forest has already impacted us and how much farther there is to go.
Robert, one of our Forest Keepers in the New Creative Era space, recently compared today's internet to a city with only one restaurant: enormous, globally optimized, and fundamentally one place. What he wants instead: thousands of different internets and human-scale rooms. "I've essentially quit all social media," he writes. "The only social spaces online I now give my lifeforce to are DFOS spaces."
Though we're needing to spend an increasing amount of time in public to help tell this story, we agree. There's an exchange we had with Josh during this past season of the podcast that reminds us why we need dark forests.
What the forest is for
An excerpt from this season of New Creative Era.
YANCEY: The dark forest is a counterbalance to the public feed. If you post in a public feed, you’re thinking, how much reach can this get? Who will see this? Will it find its way through all these places? I hope it goes wide. There's a default assumption that anything you post can be seen by anybody. You're operating with that meta-awareness in your head.
A dark forest, in contrast, is where you know only a limited number of people are going to see what you say. There’s no thought of the public audience you have to concern yourself. The dark forest is the safer space. It's the groupchat hivemind you're contributing to. You're contributing to a brain. You're becoming part of something bigger.
JOSH: The unspoken assumption we bring to our day jobs, media engagement, friendships, and social lives is that we're in the constant pursuit of infinite scale. The basic assumptions of the Web 2.0 internet that millennials grew up with were internalized culturally, socially, and economically to the extent that they rewrote our way of thinking. We were all coasting on top of this memetic transmission of extremely viral materials, explosively transmittable stories, the scale of which had been unprecedented in human history.
YANCEY: Talking about this now is like a fish seeing the water that you swim in. The assumption of potential global scale is an extremely recent event. But what that's created for us as individuals is both the blessing and curse of scale. The blessing that anyone in the world can discover me. The curse that everyone has discovered me and it's a bad thing.
What was called social media is now just media. Dark forests are more like social anti-media. Not trying to create media, but trying to create a social space without that performative element where we’re all competing to be the most famous person on a platform each day. When you remove that, what's still there?
JOSH: A lot of these things start informally as an esoteric group of private friends invested in some strange values that do not easily translate to the market. Then they pickle those things in a jar, carry it forward, and later take it out and share it with the world. You have this brilliant knowledge that's been safeguarded. You've kept the flame alive. That's what they allow to happen.
Building the forest
Five weeks in, and the DFOS flame is burning. In the past five weeks, more than 2,000 people found their way in from 28 countries, writing 600+ posts and sending 12,000+ chat messages between them. Our work to build the dark forest as infrastructure is coming to life.
This is an especially momentous week in our very short history:
Pioneer access
Today the first 2,000 founding members get something they’ve earned: the ability to create their own spaces, with their own channels, permissions, culture, and economics. Starting today the dark forest becomes theirs to tend. Wider access opens in April.
Money
This week money becomes part of the forest. Paid subscriptions, space gating, and treasury visibility are coming online. For the first time, DFOS spaces will be able to sustain themselves financially.
Groups
This week also sees the introduction of sub-communities within spaces. Groups within groups, with their own feeds, chats, and permissions, paid or free, allowing a wider range of experiences inside a single DFOS.
SpaceCamp
A cohort for new spacerunners that kicks off next week — a week-long experiment in setting up and building together.
The journey is just beginning. See you in the forest.
