On Sunday a crowdfunding campaign was launched for Junto, which is a new breed of social media designed to inspire authenticity and enable expression in its purest form. The Kickstarter campaign will run for 30 days, starting January 27th, and is intended to raise funds towards their official release this summer.

Junto is a decentralized social media app being built on Holochain. The following dialogue has been taken from our interview with Junto and addresses the who, what, and why of building on Holochain.

Interview

Tell us your origin story

The concept of Junto started as a personal journey of discovery to my most authentic self. Growing up was a constant struggle in terms of being able to express myself independently without regard to what other people thought. After my first year of college, I noticed that this was a pattern with other people as well. There’s an inability to move beyond the boundaries that exist within ourselves, which creates division between people and the inability to connect on a deeper level. I went to speak with one of my mentors. We discussed how social media tends to perpetuate the problem in terms of external validation of our self-worth and over-analysis of sharing. We thought that just a shift of awareness in and of itself could cause positive change interactions. An idea evolved for a new kind of social media.

Tell us about Junto

Junto actually means TOGETHER in Spanish. It is a new breed of social media founded on authenticity. What we currently see in social media is that it doesn’t translate into real life; there tends to be an over-analysis of how people express themselves, and representation of the individual as perfect. Our hope is to enable expression in its purest form on our platform, and we believe that intention in and of itself will translate into people being more open, vulnerable, honest, and willing to connect with others.

Junto doesn’t have any vanity metrics; no follow accounts, no “like” buttons, no advertisements, no commercialization. The problem with these things is that they create external validations of self-worth. Attention deficit and addictive qualities, in terms of what’s included in a news feed come into play. This takes a lot of time away from things that are actually important on a deeper level and from genuine human connection. We have integrated conscious design patterns and distributed technology to create a medium that enables and encourages people to be themselves and removes these negative influences.