Envisioning the Future of Territories

This post is a response to the following comment from Alex Lange on my latest post announcing that writers and community builders can now launch their own Territories.

Thanks so much for your comment, Alex!

I'd love to take this opportunity to share some of the vision behind Territories, and what to expect from it in the near future. We've also been gathering user feedback from various sources, like this prompt from Edward Carpenter, this post from stringynotloopy, and messages on Discord in our #🧩｜feedback channel.

While I cannot promise all these features will be built and shipped, I hope that transparently discussing the thinking behind our product will help our community continue to provide feedback that heavily shapes the direction of t2. That being said, leave any other thoughts you might have below, or post them in our feedback prompt.

Autonomous Territories

Re: 1/ We envision a future for Territories with some levels of autonomous capabilities, so if the scenario did arise for a Territory merger then we would gladly offer the platform to support it! We expect Territories often have amorphous borders and are likely to have overlaps, but unlikely to be exactly the same.

We're already starting to see some of this overlapping happen, as evident with the emergence of t/Stories, t/Prose, and t/TwiggTales, which all focus on creative storytelling, yet have slightly different intentions, and therefore result in slightly different communities forming around them.

While larger Territories may be necessary or even better for scaled engagement and distribution, niche communities are often shaped and formed between smaller groups. The future of Territories should support both use cases, and facilitate any actions communities are interested in taking.

The relation between Territory and Posts

Re: 2/ We're definitely thinking about how we can allow one post to be in multiple Territories at the same time. Writing, just like any other content on the internet, is difficult to categorize into a singular topic. Some of the most important and fascinating pieces are often written on the intersection between topics.

We imagine in the near future, that posts and prompts may be allowed to be a part of multiple Territories. However, there are still a few outstanding questions for us to consider:

• how t.p. should be attributed should the post be a part of multiple Territories
• the permissions of curation, governance, and moderation between members of each Territory, and how those permissions are shared on a post that is in multiple Territories
• limitations on posting to multiple Territories to prevent spam or user abuse

We'll continue to evaluate and discuss how to build a solution here that is fair and effective for the future of t2.

Navigation and Discovery

Re: 3/ In our recent brainstorms about how to improve t2, we've frequently come across the topic of navigation and discovery on the platform. Since we now have more than enough content and plenty of new Territories, this is a more recent issue that has come up more frequently from user feedback as well.

For t2, we're envisioning a niche blogging platform for long-form writing that is built for 2024, something that is built for the modern era of digital writing. We're often inspired by the design practices of our contemporaries, like Arc Browser, Are.na, and Notion, which combine incredible user experiences with performance and productivity.

Breaking down navigation and discovery, we can imagine there being 3 primary areas to focus on:

• navigation from t2 world to a specific Territory, aka discovering new Territories, including navigation between Territories
• navigation within a Territory, allowing the discovery of posts, prompts, and people
• navigation between people, prompts, and posts, enabling the discovery new content on any surface

For an initial stopgap to improve navigation, we'll be introducing a search function soon, which I'm incredibly excited for, and has also been highly requested by users.

t2 and Tipping

Re: 4/ Tipping has always been brought up as a common way for readers to offer high-signal appreciation for the writer via monetary methods. However, when thinking about tipping holistically, tipping has yet to demonstrate that it is a sustainable and scalable way for writers to be rewarded.

When it comes to writer needs, although monetization ranks highly as one of the key "jobs to be done", we've learned from writer conversations and plenty of user research that feedback, engagement, and impact on a reader often surpass the importance of monetization. It has always been important to us to support writers monetarily, and we are working hard on a monetization strategy that we hope to share more about soon. We will never rule out tipping, and will continue to consider it as part of our larger monetization discussions.

Alternatively, we also want to explore other ways of capturing meaningful interactions between people that aren't necessarily the exchange of fiat or cryptocurrencies. Hence, we're initially using Time Points (t.p.) to explore how we can align reader and writer incentives using measurements of attention.

We're also going to continue to work hard on distribution and engagement problems, as those have always properly motivated writers beyond monetary rewards, and is more aligned with how we envision the type of content that is unique to t2.

Concluding Thoughts

We're super grateful that we're beginning to find users who genuinely care about the experience on t2, and are willing to help shape the product. Exchanges like this helps everyone understand that ultimately, t2 is aligned with the interests of writers and readers for whom we build this platform for.

We always welcome feedback, so don't hesitate to let us know what you think via the following methods:

• Post a comment or reply in the feedback prompt in t/TimeSquare
• Head to Discord and post your feedback in our #🧩｜feedback channel
• Tag us with feedback via Lens posts (@t2world) or on X (@t2wrld)
• Reach out to any team member from t2 directly on Lens!
  • CEO: @mengyao
  • COO: @sammi
  • Product Manager: @icecoffee
  • Head of Marketing: @wanshu

Thank you!!