A new curated internet.
Silk is a blogging platform for creative research,
moodboarding, and subculture.
The last three decades of being online have shown us over and over again that lasting culture cannot be automated and meaningful creativity cannot be manufactured. Both must be given the proper time, space, and tools needed to blossom organically and of their own accord. From cavemen to hippies, the core of our cultures have revolved around shared objects, interests, and spaces.
As such, during this age of ultra-connectivity, one might expect that our society would be seeing a profound benefit from the abundance of information, resources, and people all gathered within links reach. Unfortunately this has not yet been the case — in fact, it’s been quite the opposite.
Rather than learning, creating, and growing closer together, many of us are being isolated, atomized, and coaxed into digital confines apart from one another. We have increasingly found ourselves existing outside of balanced and dynamic cultural spaces, and instead inside of extractive, corporate-driven echo chambers. The incentives are all wrong.
So, unlike those who understand culture as commodity, we are here to offer independents refreshing new infrastructure that holds critical thought, organic connection, and the facilitation of shared meaning above all.
With Silk, users can expect…
Blogs
It’s less about how you look and more about what you’re looking at.
Welcome back to blogging, the lost art of the early internet. Your Silk is for weaving a web of all the most interesting things you find online, like that one Radiohead interview that only exists on an abandoned website from 2000, or that Yahoo Japan jacket listing with unreasonably beautiful product photography. Save it all here with the click of a button.
You can think of this as a place for self expression via taste in media. Write captions, pin your favorites to your profile, follow other blogs, and connect with like-minds — you already know the drill.
Private Archives
One home for all of your references.
Collect your favorite media and inspiration from all across the web with your own personal internet archive.
Privately store images, videos, songs, social posts, articles, product listings, webpages, and virtually anything else you can find online right here on your Silk. Complete with modern organization tools, an array of content filters, and a state-of-the-art search engine.
Forget about taking screenshots, pasting links into your notes, dealing with folder systems, or downloading images to a cluttered camera roll — simply save it to Silk.
Webs
Multimedia moodboarding.
We made a new type of moodboard called a “web.” Unlike the image and video based grids we’ve all gotten used to, Silk allows any type of digital media to be dynamically arranged next to another.
Consider boards of images next to webpages, Soundcloud songs next to YouTube videos, PDFs next to Instagram posts, or even raw MP3s next to product listings. It’s Worldbuilding Software.
What’s also worth noting is that webs are stored natively within your blog and come with visibility settings for privacy. They each come strapped with collaborator toggles as well, so you should feel free to add a few friends to a web for some joint action, or even open one up for everybody — like a wiki.
Connections
A refreshing take on the rabbit hole.
We want each interaction on Silk to be productive; to create a chain reaction. This means we’re choosing not to support vanity metrics like follower counts and likes, which have shown themselves to feel empty and meaningless.
Our solution is dead simple: when you stumble into a piece of media that you’re interested in, just press the “Connect” button. This will give you the option to add the media back to your public blog, your private archive, any of your webs, or even a chat room. Each time a public connection is made, a link pointing to its new location will appear in a list attached to the original media for others to find.
Making connections on Silk means contributing to an organic network of human-curated information, communities, and culture with every click. We’re essentially creating a new internet.
Chat Rooms
Let your interests introduce you to your people.
We have opted to do without the traditional comment section in favor of the community forum. When you have something you’d like to say about a piece of media, connect it back to a chat room and open up a new discussion thread.
This naturally encourages comments that are discussion-provoking, relevant to the topic at hand, and at best, highly socially rewarding. You’re welcome to set passwords on rooms to help keep them local, or leave them open to cultivate larger communities.
Rooms are nestled into blogs and webs just like everything else on Silk, which creates a sort of Easter egg effect while you explore connected media. You might imagine finding an archive fashion community while you browse a web dedicated to ‘90s Margiela collections. Or a Bladee forum in a web full of Drain pics.
Magic Search
Beyond Keywords.
Each piece of media uploaded to our platform is auto-tagged with its visual attributes and associations to reduce dependency on manual hashtags — and thus, you. Quit putting aside time to organize things in the middle of your research flow. Just save it to Silk and let us handle the rest.
When you’re ready to review what you’ve found, hit your archive and search for the relevant colors, objects, keywords, quotes, brands, formats, time stamps, or whatever else comes to mind. Be as descriptive or vague as you want, we will know exactly what you mean.
Ad-free
No Ads. You can relax now.
No dropshippers, no corporate accounts, and best of all — no targeted advertising. The rest of the internet profits off of selling your personal data, but not here. We don’t exploit the independent, we fight for them.
No ads. Not even on our free tier.
This is one of the first real chances we’ve had to rehabilitate online creative culture in what feels like forever.
Obscure references, talented individuals, niche subcultures, novel products, and deep knowledge relevant to your interests — it’s all here on Silk.
We are trying to build something with as much cultural integrity as possible for you, the independent. Making tools for creativity and community online are our priorities above all else, including making a profit.
This is not some giant corporate operation, this is not another cog in the mass culture machine. This is just a group of creative, likeminded individuals who miss what the internet used to feel like.
Here's to a new curated internet.
