Have you ever asked yourself, “What if social media was worse?” Month Friend seeks to answer this question with its deliberately “bad” design. At the beginning of each month, Month Friend pairs you up with a completely random person. Every day, you receive an email containing a prompt and your Month Friend’s message from the previous day… and that’s about it. Only one message per day and one person you can send the message to. In a world where you can connect with anyone across the world, why would you choose to limit yourself like this? I sat down for a phone interview with Month Friend’s creator to try and find out.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Register Forum: Could you please briefly introduce yourself and Month Friend?
Month Friend: I’m just this guy from Cambridge who is responsible for at least 90% of Month Friend. While I call it a social network, I think about it mainly as being like an art project with this strange means of communication being the medium.
RF: Have you done any projects similar to this in the past?
MF: Not really. It is pretty basic Google Sheets code, and some flyers are put up in the Greater Boston area. I had somebody email me about a week in, saying that I should contact this organization that invests in local social networks, but that wasn’t really what I was looking for. I just have this weird, dumb thing that I’m doing.
RF: How do you come up with prompts?
MF: Initially, I was analyzing what sort of prompts got higher response rates. Eventually, I realized that’s what most other social medias use, mainly with the goal of keeping your attention for as long as they can. So, instead of doing that, I’m just trying to have fun with it. They intentionally don’t really have a rhyme or reason because they aren’t meant to be the main focus.
RF: Where do you see Month Friend going in the future?
MF: I have a lot of hypothetical plans. Unlike most social networks, an individual’s experience with Month Friend has nothing to do with how many people use it. While I would love for it to grow, I am not focused on it. There are only about 30 people signed up right now, but if it gets much bigger, I would like to use something other than email. The biggest problem with Month Friend right now is low response rates, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get those up without using the aforementioned tactics that I don’t like.
RF: How do you feel Month Friend fits in with mainstream social media?
MF: I have a few big problems with social media. The first is that it encourages you to view others through the lenses of stereotypes, and it’s easy to dismiss people as a part of a homogeneous group you disagree with. The second is that its sheer scale is overwhelming and tends to heighten disagreements and arguments. Month Friend aims to solve these problems by, in a sense, being worse. It’s not optimized, and you can only talk to one person at a time, but my hope is that this makes the interactions you have more genuine.
