The Revised Ello Manifesto

Your social network has colors.

What's the point of those? Deceit.

Your social network has other people and not just the two weird guys who told you to join and some tech journalist who posts about nothing but the death of Facebook. Who could ask for more than that? Trust us, this is not going to be as depressing as Google+ all over again.

Your social network has advertisers who pay for the social network to continue operating. You are the product that is bought and sold to pay for servers. To pay for coders. To pay for Vietnamese takeout on Fridays.

We believe there is a better way. An empty social network with no ads. A social network that keeps costs low by not using a lot of bandwidth on graphics. We believe in a social network that looks like a text file. One with circles and no sense of design. A social network you will join and then never look at again. But not like Google+, seriously.

We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and patching in privacy settings because we accidentally gave away the full names of all our users. We believe in a partnership between the social network and the users who are going to be complaining any time we inevitably try to make any money off this thing.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Like fire or the wheel, only it lets you share pictures of cats and make vague, self-pitying posts about how hard your day was. It lets you rediscover friends who told you to join Ello on Facebook. It lets you be smug because you were an early adopter with a name like @beef or @jim and not like those late adopters like @roastbeef and @james.

You are not a product. You're a sort of apelike creature that likes to post pictures of what you are having for dinner and talk about your kids to nobody.

It may be another hollow experience. Another desperate scream into the digital abyss that will go unanswered.

But goddamn it, there aren't ads.

The Ello Team

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)