Most of us carry the same image of what real friendship looks like. A living room with soft lamps. Four or five people on a couch, a coffee table in the middle, a conversation that lasts longer than anyone meant it to. Sitcoms sold it to us for decades: the orange couch on Friends, the booth and the apartment on How I Met Your Mother. It’s the picture that comes up when anyone says “real friends.” Almost none of us actually live inside it anymore.

What we live inside is different. Instead of a living room, we built the equivalent of Times Square in our pocket. A feed we scroll alone. Ads wedged between every conversation. A hundred voices shouting to be heard. A counter at the top of every screen, telling us how loud we were.

Our entire digital social life runs on a single metaphor, and the metaphor is the town square.

How the broadcast stage got smuggled in

The language gives it away. We have feeds, walls, timelines, followers, reach, and posts. Every one of those words comes from radio, television, or the actual town square: a public space where one voice speaks and many listen. Elon Musk has described Twitter/X as “the de facto public town square,” and Jack Dorsey used nearly identical language before him. The metaphor isn’t a marketing accident. It’s the design brief.

But the relationships that carry a life don’t happen in town squares. They happen on couches. Around dinner tables. In kitchens at 11 p.m. when one of you finally says the hard thing. That room is what friendship actually runs on, and almost nothing about it resembles a feed.

The living room that never arrived

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg published a roughly 3,200-word memo titled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.” In it, he drew a distinction that’s stuck with us ever since. “Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

Seven years later, the feed still runs on the logic it always did. The living room never got built, because the ad business can’t be funded from one. There is no audience in a living room. There’s no attention to package and sell when a handful of friends are actually talking to each other.

Part of why the town square feels bad to live in is that we weren’t built to live in one. Sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd coined the term “context collapse” to describe what happens when every audience in our life converges in a single space. Your mother, your boss, your high school ex, your college roommate, a recruiter, a stranger from a conference. When you post into that space, you aren’t talking to anyone in particular, so you say something blander than you mean, or you perform, or you say nothing at all. The sociologist Erving Goffman called the gap between how we act in public and how we act with intimates the difference between “frontstage” and “backstage.” Broadcast platforms put us permanently frontstage, even with the people we’d normally be backstage with.

The town square has cameras on it

There is another thing a town square does that a living room does not. It watches back. Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff has spent the last decade documenting how attention in these spaces gets extracted and sold as a commodity. The algorithmic feed is sorted by what keeps you scrolling, not by what you’d actually ask to read. The whispers are logged. The model assumes the audience is never just the people you thought you were talking to.

Under that kind of observation, intimacy gets quiet. The jokes flatten. The confessions stop. What survives is the part of you that’s safe to be seen by everyone at once, which turns out to be a pretty shallow sliver of a person.

The paradox of the visible

All of this produces a strange outcome. The more visible we’ve become, the less known we feel. The platforms that promised to connect us have made us more reachable and less reachable at once. We have hundreds of followers and nobody we’d call at 2 a.m. We know what our distant acquaintances are eating and not whether our best friend is struggling. It’s a friendship recession happening inside a connection boom, and the broadcast metaphor is a quiet part of why.

What a living room actually is

The software for a living room barely exists yet, because the business model for it is harder. A living room has no audience. You cannot sell ads against a conversation between four friends. You cannot juice engagement by making it more addictive, because the friends are the point and they already like each other. You build it small, private, and easy to put down. It’s something close to the opposite of an app built to win your attention.

This is part of why we built Colloquies. We built it around a different metaphor. A small, private room for a handful of people who already know each other. A weekly prompt arrives, a few honest answers go up, and then it goes quiet until the next one, in the cadence that real friendships seem to run on. No feed. No number to chase. No stranger who might chime in. Whether we’ve built the right thing is not for us to say yet. The metaphor we’re building toward, the one behind every design choice, is the living room.

The rooms we choose

The metaphors we use for software aren’t neutral. A space designed as a town square will always pull toward performance, because that’s what town squares reward. A space designed as a living room will pull toward honesty, because that’s what living rooms allow. What we reach for in our pockets a hundred times a day is quietly shaping the texture of our inner lives, and what we reach for is a mirror of the rooms its designers imagined for us.

Maybe the question worth sitting with is what rooms we’ve been living in without meaning to, and whether the conversations we want most are even possible inside them.

Hero image by Michael Proctor on Unsplash.