*An excerpt from a letter to friends and supporters of [Meem](www.meem.wtf) | Prosocial Inc.* Since we first started Prosocial, we’ve been focused on understanding and supporting authentic connection between groups of people, and building tools that augment and help care for those relationships. In the last six months, we’ve worked specifically toward a vision of community-built tools, which enable communities to decide for themselves how they relate to one another and to design their own interfaces for their shared media objects. We partnered with a diverse set of organizations to prototype decentralized applications, allowing communities to collaboratively publish shared records according to their own rules.  Our explorations have included community tweets with [Metalabel](https://www.metalabel.xyz/), shared knowledge repositories with [Token Engineering Commons](https://tecommons.org/), an “exquisite corpse” fairytale with [Foster](https://blog.foster.co/once-upon-a-time/), vendor-led farmers markets with [$OAK](https://www.oak.community/), decentralized reporting stacks with [Journodao](https://journodao.xyz/blog/broken-news-decentralizing-journalism-to-restore-trust/), community concert calendars with [genreDAO](https://leavingrecords.com/), and more. Together, these projects have helped us better understand how communities organically negotiate their shared media objects (e.g. tweets, events, articles, books, music, vendors, etc.). It has become clear that ceding control of our collective sensemaking tools and networks to external powers is untenable.  As our ways of relating have been mediated by digital environments enclosed by private interests, our shared realities – what stories we tell and hear and retell –  have been distorted by those empowered to control our attention.  Our vision is clear: we believe there’s an urgent need (and a viable future) for decentralized public media infrastructure. We have many examples of public-interest media networks that already demonstrate how we can hold knowledge in common — from public radio, libraries, and universities to Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, public goods have been under-equipped to compete against commercial interests and our collective attention has funneled proverbially into a few large digital malls rather than a digital city. However, as big tech’s power and abuses increasingly beg questions of the public’s trust, we have discovered an appetite for wiser alternatives. There's a clear demand for social software built for the purposes of communal care rather than of scale and extraction, much in the same way that a market exists for a favorite local coffee shop as an alternative to Starbucks.  Especially as AI democratizes software development, communities will be able to build the tools and apps they need for their own use cases. We see an opportunity to coordinate and support this already emergent “indie web” with digital public infrastructure and believe that new economies will emerge as we let our differences thrive. Of course, this won’t happen overnight.  It’ll require on-the-ground collaboration over many months between these early builder communities. Given the state of the venture markets, we realized we could not fulfill our vision in the timeline required by our monthly burn. After carefully reflecting on different paths for our company, we’ve decided to enter a period of hibernation. This will allow community tooling to evolve and markets to continue to digest the impact of AI, regulation, and decentralization efforts.