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Foraging Platform Design

Core Principles​

  • No Following, No Global Graph: Users cannot follow each other. Influence is room-local and decays with inactivity.
  • Rooms Never Truly Die: Communities go dormant but are not deleted, preserving historical footprints for discovery and revival.
  • Eviction Is Hygiene, Not Punishment: Inactive members are cycled out after long decay periods, freeing slots while signaling value through scarcity.
  • Scarcity Drives Intimacy: Rooms have hard caps (with narrow ranges, e.g. 50–100 members). Large, thousand-member rooms are impossible.
  • Discovery Feels Like Foraging: Users browse activity charts, not infinite feeds. Joining a room feels like uncovering a living ecosystem, not subscribing to a content firehose.

Membership Lifecycle​

  • Join → Active → Dormant → Evicted → Cooldown → Rejoin
  • Eviction is automatic after inactivity passes thresholds.
  • Cooldowns prevent slot-squatting and bot churn.
  • Away tokens (limited per year) allow pausing decay during vacations or emergencies.

Room-Level Policies​

  • Hard Caps: Size fixed within platform-mandated range.
  • Participation Required: Seats are not permanent; all members subject to decay.
  • No Selling/Clout Farming: Rooms are not promotion channels; feedback system flags low-value or overly promotional dynamics.

Discovery & Search​

Discovery uses a bubble-style foraging UI, with optional charts/tabs for power users:

Bubble Canvas (default)​

  • Bubbles = rooms. Size encodes current activity; border thickness encodes capacity pressure; color hue encodes mode (voice/live-text/async), and saturation encodes freshness.
  • Physics: bubbles drift toward your weighted preferences (freshness, intimacy, depth); dormant rooms sink but remain discoverable.
  • Hover reveals: live headcount, queue length, 7/30d sparkline, “vibe” tags (e.g., balanced, mentor-heavy).
  • Click opens the room panel with tabs (below).

Tabs in Room Panel​

  • Activity: historical and real-time participation chart (like trading candles or a sparkline deck).
  • Conversations: recent sessions with avg participants, duration, mode breakdown.
  • Footprint: dormancy history, revival streaks, talk-time equity metrics.
  • Queue/Capacity: current cap, seats free, estimated queue ETA band.
  • Feedback: randomized, LLM-assisted impressions aggregated and de-gamed (never user-initiated).
  • Similar: nearby bubbles by topic/mode/size.

Additional Discovery Signals​

  • Conversation Metrics: avg participants per session; voice vs. text ratio.
  • Dormancy Status: active → cooling → dormant, with revival badges.
  • Room Footprints: public activity records that never delete.
  • Balanced Surfacing: intentional mix of dormant legacy rooms and new sprouts.

Note: “bubble” here is a UI metaphor for surfacing/float dynamics — not the bubble‑sort algorithm.

Feedback & Reputation​

  • Contextual Reputation Only: Scores decay and are room-specific.
  • Feedback System: Users provide randomized, low-effort evaluations that inform room footprints without gaming.
  • No Global Rankings: Discovery is based on browsing, filters, and user-set weights, not universal leaderboards.

Outcome​

  • Intimacy Over Scale: Communities remain small enough to form real bonds.
  • Scarcity Makes Participation Meaningful: Seats are valued because they are limited and revocable.
  • Serendipity Returns: Users discover rooms like explorers, not consumers.
  • Evolutionary Dynamics: If excluded, users can fork and start their own rooms, growing the ecosystem.
  • PK-ToDo Add link Bubble-Style Discovery UI: a visual foraging interface where rooms appear as interactive bubbles that surface based on your weights (freshness, size, mode), not the bubble‑sort algorithm.