Thread by @pdavison

Big news :)

@clubhouse is splitting up… into many clubhouses.

It’s a huge evolution of the app that @rohanseth, the team and I have been working on for months.

Beta is here! forms.gle/659VjMKmB37dkE…

Why the change?….

The best social experiences are not open to everyone. They are small and curated. This is what creates intimacy, trust and friendship.

What is one of the most memorable social experiences you’ve had in the past decade? Who was it with?

It might have been a trip with friends and family. A wedding. A dinner party. A house party. A curated get-together. A festival or camp. Or maybe just a random evening that started small and turned into something big — where you showed up with a few friends and left with more.

These friendships are what defines our lives. But real moments of togetherness don’t happen very often – because we’re all busy, serendipity is hard to engineer, and meeting up takes time.

It’s a problem @rohanseth and I have been trying to tackle for years.

In 2006, I spent time researching friend-matching in school. In 2011, I built @highlight with @benagarr to help you meet friends-of-friends around you. This is me talking with @om about it back in the day: om.co/gigaom/highlig…

@rohanseth loves social products too, and he spent years working on the same problem. This is an app called Phone-a-Friend that he launched with @rohandang in 2016, to help friend groups talk with each other more often: paf.memrylabs.com

After a lot of swings, the two of us launched @clubhouse in 2020. We built it in a few weeks, and it was scrappy. Our icon was a photo of Bill Murray and the whole app was a single room, where our community of friends-of-friends would talk, share ideas, and meet each other.

The small size and density of connections led to a great experience and crazy word-of-mouth growth. We tried to limit signups by requiring an existing member to invite you, but that perversely made people want to join more and flooded the hallway with less relevant rooms. Whoops.

Noise causes churn. Somehow, millions made it through the madness, found their people, and form the core of our community today: Big thinkers, amazing writers, amateur pizza makers, scientists, musicians. They are incredible. The best community in the world.

But we’ve learned it’s more than one community. It’s too big. Not everyone wants to talk about the same things! People have different styles and ways of coming together. And the right rooms are hard to find. A single community just doesn’t work beyond a certain size.

Communities need to be able to undergo mitosis as they grow — so they can split into new ones and the intimacy can scale. That’s how /r/music spawns /r/hiphopheads. It’s why classrooms max out at a certain size, and why people form smaller circles when a house party grows.

To evolve @clubhouse we’re breaking it up.

The new graph structure will allow any person, group, or community to create its own House — with its own personality, culture and content moderation rules — where members can meet up regularly, talk, and hop from room to room.

House member lists will be public, because it’s more fun that way. Many rooms on @clubhouse will still be public too, and everyone will be able to explore the public hallways, discovering new people and cultures from around the world. Only the House rooms will be private.

The beta that’s shipping soon feels good. We know there will be a lot to tune, but we have years of capital in the bank and we’re long-term committed to the product. The world is going increasingly remote, and getting together with people you like needs to be easier.

If you joined the beta using the link above and need help setting up your House, @rohanseth and I host weekly Town Halls and New User Orientation sessions, along with our amazing teammates. We love talking with the community, so please come by and get free tech support!

If you run a public show on @clubhouse, keep doing it! More people joining Houses = more people jumping into your rooms… and a lot of interesting new ways to connect intimately with your listeners.

Finally, if you’re interested in the mission, come build with us! My teammates are brilliant & humble and it’s amazing to us that we get to work on this thing. clubhouse.com/jobs

Ok, Twitter UI is suggesting I make this a newsletter, so that's it for now... Thx for reading!