Hi friends, what have you all been learning?

Many years ago (as captured in my 2017 Thread), I was trying to work out not just what everyone in my fascinating networks of friends, peers and collaborators were doing, but what knowledge they’d gathered.

When you know people over years and decades, it’s easy to lose track of what everyone has learned, what they are interested in, and what unexpected collaborations might exist as a result.

I’m often approached as someone who ‘probably knows someone who does that‘ and wanted to work out how to do that better, and to get out of the way far faster.

I wondered how to better encourage serendipity: part of this was to hold salon-like evenings on M/S Hans to bring dozens of people together in-person and see what just happened. The energy from those events got me thinking about tools that could support everyone in those quite random settings, without creating yet another social network or yet another thing that got in the way more than it helped.

Let’s connect on our skills and interests and have fun

The same challenge applies to most networking events, socials, and conferences—there’s a plethora of ‘conference apps’ that are every bit as awful as you’d imagine (Whova, Hopin, Brella et al). But how to connect communities who have ideas, collaboration and work to do together? You might remember someone who you met at an event, half-remember their organisation, might want make an introduction and you can’t quite pull the thread, and everyone’s overwhelmed with social media connections.

For example, in work settings, the usual solution is LinkedIn. However, the usual problem with LinkedIn is that it’s LinkedIn: optimised for broadcasting and monetisation not belonging, and your data is theirs the moment you post it. Most people I know who use LinkedIn to connect after a business event just use its messaging function to get to an email address and then stop using it for that. So, there’s a signal!

To start, how about we do less? (but with more fun)

cl8 is a really small thing: a directory.

I grew up in a village of about 700 people – after a while you’d kind of just know everyone’s phone number, and have a sense of what they did. And, if you rewind a few decades, the person who would definitely know that was…the local telephone operator. One of the last telephone operators was a family friend (thank you Margie Knox), and she knew everyone, everything (and more) about everyone, including how they all connected with each other.

So, can we reboot this in the 2026?

Why not just use something that already exists?

Nothing I’ve found so far quite fills this gap in this way.

I’m sure many have tried and failed (and we may too, but have more fun trying). One pattern I’m sure of though: small things can survive if they stay the right shape.

Looking at alternatives, they tend to fall into three categories: SaaS products that will likely eventually enshittify (Orbit, Luma, and Common Room already did); self-hosted tools that require a lot more faff than the challenge warrants (it needs to be as easy as possible); or shared documents (e.g. Airtable) that go stale because that’s just what happens: the utility or enthusiasm atrophies and, let’s face it, they’re just so desperately dull.

None of them seem to hold the shape of a human network, run by individuals, with communities of overlapping and transitory interests, where skills might cluster and gaps are plentiful. And, of course, all of them involve handing your member data to a platform with rights that seek to keep them, rather than keeping users in control.

I wanted something lightweight enough to actually run myself, curated enough to stay useful, and honest about what it is: more of a social directory rather than a social network. Yes, also looking back to where a lot of social networks began (looking at you, Well), and re-asking if the incentives to ‘keep growing’ were the wrong solutions, and for the wrong reasons (looking at you, FB, Tw*t, Ning, and the rest of you).

On words

cl8 is a compression of “constellation”, the name I use for communities of practice, and the (astronomical) language that threads through a lot of my projects.

A constellation isn’t a random scatter of points, it’s more like a pattern that becomes legible when you can work out how to read it. The points were always there: a constellation is what happens when you impose meaning on proximity and cl8 is, perhaps, a type of social telescope. The people were already in the room, more or less: the tool just makes connections visible. Less stuff, more fun.

What it does

You sign in with Google or a verified email, fill in your name, a short bio, and tag yourself with your skills and interests. Ideally not job titles, but rather the things you’d say to someone when meeting them at one of my salon evenings on the boat.

It’s a searchable, private directory where your profile is visible only to other authenticated members of that cl8 instance. Access is granted by whoever runs that community: human curation is part of the design.

It can run on your own server, your community controls the membership, and your data is yours. I’ve built it for my dgen network constellation (you can sign up at d.cl8.io and as its curator it may take me a little while to manually approve you). The first instance is also running for IB1 (Icebreaker One), which is exactly the point: one tool, many communities, each owning their own. You can sign up for that one at ib1.org/constellation.

And yes, you’ll hopefully find some things in all of this that surprise and delight: it’s the start of a journey to doing things differently. It should be fun, so adding in things for your specific, quirky, bonkers community is up to you. Less faff, more fun.

On building it

cl8 is a just few hundred KB of code: a single Node.js file with zero npm dependencies. It mirrors the same architecture as Broadside: copy the file to a server, configure, start a service, done. The data lives in flat JSON. The whole thing was built with AI assistance in the same spirit as the other tools in this stack: it’s been something I’ve wanted for years, and AI has helped me build it in about the same time as it would have taken to evaluate and customise any SaaS alternatives and then sign up for none of them.

It’s meant to be the absolute minimum. A social directory for a few hundred people doesn’t need a database cluster, it does need good session management, solid authentication and security, and enough care in the UI to make filling in your profile feel like something other than homework. Less code, more fun.

If you run a community of practice and you’re tired of it living inside someone else’s product, ping me. It’s open licence, deployable in under an hour, and then the only person looking after your community’s data is you (and them).