A place online that belongs to the people who live here.
The platforms most of us use every day were never built for us. They were built to gather our attention and sell it, and so they follow a familiar arc — more ads, more noise, more outrage, and steadily less of the people we actually came to find. Cory Doctorow has a name for that slow rot. High Desert begins by refusing it.
The question underneath the whole project is simple. What if the place where Central Oregon gathers online were owned by Central Oregon — not by shareholders, not by advertisers, but by the neighbors who use it every day?
High Desert is a set of local social spaces — one for each of six Central Oregon towns — built as shared community infrastructure rather than a product. It is small on purpose, honest by design, and accountable to its members instead of to a market.
High Desert is built from a small shelf of books — a belief that a healthier digital commons is genuinely possible, if you design for it from the very first decision. Five ideas do most of the work.
Platforms rot when their incentive is to extract — first they're good to users, then they squeeze users to please advertisers, then they squeeze everyone to please themselves. The decline isn't a failure of the model; it is the model.
No advertising, ever, and a flat price that cannot climb without the community's consent. Remove the incentive to get worse, and the place is free to stay good.
You cannot improve a system you don't understand. Real change comes from finding a system's leverage points — not from chasing its symptoms or imposing a plan from outside.
Before a single feature ships, we study the community as it actually is — who lives here, what's under strain (housing, water, wildfire), how people already find one another. We listen before we build.
Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing what economists had assumed impossible: ordinary communities can steward a shared resource well, for generations, without a corporation or a government in charge — provided a handful of design principles are in place.
Genuine self-governance. Members set the rules by vote; longer-tenured neighbors carry a little more weight; consequences are graduated and fair, always with a path back. The whole design is being audited against her eight principles, one by one.
When something you belong to begins to slip, you have two options: leave it, or speak up to mend it. Most platforms only ever let you leave. The capacity to stay and improve a thing has to be built deliberately.
Voice is designed in from the start, so members shape the place rather than abandon it. Because they own it, staying and improving becomes the rational choice — not just the loyal one.
Who owns a thing — and how it is financed — quietly decides who it will ultimately serve. Values stated in a mission statement rarely survive an ownership structure that points the other way.
Ownership and economics are settled on day one: below-market founder pay, surplus that flows to local causes, and a built-in trigger to convert into a nonprofit. The structure isn't paperwork — it's the promise.
Connection with roots, on infrastructure the community holds.
A platform can corrode a community or it can knit one together. The difference is almost entirely in the design choices. High Desert is shaped, end to end, around mutual support.
Residency verification means the people you meet here genuinely share your place. A favor asked, a tool borrowed, a recommendation given — it all has roots, because it's all local.
The feed is chronological and honest. You follow what you choose; nothing is engineered to enrage you, addict you, or keep you scrolling past the point of usefulness. Your attention is yours.
Every genuine community event is welcome, across the political and religious spectrum — the test is whether something serves the community, never whether we happen to agree with it. And the founding group is built to actually resemble Central Oregon, not just its newest arrivals.
Once the work is sustainably paid for, the surplus goes to local causes the community itself chooses. The platform is a means to a stronger town — never an end in itself.
Further out, we hope to build a peer partnership with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs — beginning with questions rather than plans, and grounded firmly in tribal sovereignty and genuine co-ownership. It is an aspiration to earn slowly and on their terms, not a feature to announce.
Principles are easy to state and easy to abandon. These are the decisions that are already locked — the ones that turn the ideas above into promises a member can hold us to.