So. Ello. Yet Another Social Network. Another opportunity to ‘connect’ to the same people to whom I am already allegedly connected, in database JOINs scattered across the world wide web. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Flickr. Swarm née Foursquare. Even Diaspora* and App.net, the most recent abortive attempts to wrest control of our social lives from the hands of Lord Business Zuckerberg. And I received an email last night announcing the imminent launch of Heartbeat, a so-called “social network client” that is “peer-to-peer” and “private by default”. Check, check, check.

All of these sites typically walk you through a sign-up procedure that encourages you to “find your friends”. Some do it sneakily, requesting access to your phone contacts or Gmail password; others are better behaved, merely sieving your Facebook or Twitter friends for matches. Either way, the result is the same — a ready-made social group comprising the same people you’ve already had your fill of hearing about, seeing pictures of, comparing your life with.

That’s not social. I already know those people. I don’t need to connect to them again.

At Ello, I feel like trying something different.

In Lev Grossman’s 2011 book, The Magician King, he imagines for one of his characters an anonymous, online social network named “Free Trader Beowulf”. The price for admission is to solve a number of ridiculously arcane puzzles — I seem to remember it also involved geocaching, the go-to activity for any author attempting to grasp the hipster zeitgeist — but, once inside, participants enjoy an intellectual blend of conversation, debate and word games. Ernest Cline’s YA novel Ready Player One features a similar-but-different anonymous network, wherein his teen protagonist meets like-minded cyber-warriors and, um, saves the world or something. I forget.

While Ello is neither anonymous nor likely to feature in any potential future world-saving scenario, the idea of connecting with new, unknown, interesting people from around the world (or, depending on Ello’s eventual growth or lack thereof, interesting hipsters from Vermont) is seductive. It seems to me to be closer to the core idea of a social network: discovering new things via shared connections. So, I am embarking on an experiment. I’ll be adding none of my existing network of ‘friends’ — on Ello, I will only be connecting to and engaging with interesting strangers.

If you’d like to join the experiment, you know where to find me.