Connections are relevant in the form of groups, which are private to you: you use them to set conversation audiences and control whose conversations appear in y

Connections are relevant in the form of groups, which are private to you: you use them to set conversation audiences and control whose conversations appear in your news feed. Our target audience is those who want to converse online without the restraints and commitments of social media services which aim to addict rather than to support and convey language. We don't aim to enable the discovery of interesting links - Reddit has this completely down. But it's no good for conversing in a focussed way with people you know. Letters and email link people internationally in ways that are impossible on Facebook or Twitter. When you receive an email, you read it in a focussed space without distractions; and you're aware of the fact that it was personally sent to you as opposed to broadcast to a large channel. Narrowcast will always be a personal experience than coming across a message delivered by a mysterious algorithm. Lyra does have a public news feed in which conversations are viewable to all users. If you add people to your groups and set the feed to view only these, it's the exact equivalent of Facebook. What we don't do is offer particular spaces (hashtags or subfora) because these instantly offer a target for harrassment and abuse, and require moderation. Lyra's design makes it trivial for people and topics which are vulnerable to abuse, to control their reading and avoid it.