For all those who follow this subreddit and who have the impression that there is not much going on, let me try to summarize what has been going on so far:

The idea of /r/unalone and this website emerged from the impression that other subreddits such as /r/ForeverAlone or r/lonely are – while having their full usefulness and justification – are at times a bit depressing and we were looking for a place that focuses more on ideas, tricks, tips etc, similarly to what r/personalfinance does for personal finances.

While initially quite a lot of people joined /r/unalone (there are some 220 redditors here at present), the conversations never got really dynamic. It was probably just not enough of a “critical mass” of people here to inspire each others.

Out of this lack of interesting conversations grew the idea of a hackathon on what we can do about loneliness. That’s when we started having almost weekly video-hangouts on our discord channel.

And out of these conversations grew the idea of a movement like “Alcoholics Anonymous” but for lonely people.

At present, we are still very much in a brainstorming state. Ideas do get more and more concrete, but there are still rather embryos of ideas than an actual project. Nonetheless, here is what we are discussing and working on:

The unalone meetups:

The idea is to give the tools to individual to organise meetups that can make some change for lonely people. It’s based on the premise that “no one gets out of loneliness alone” and it’s to some extend inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous. It breaks down into several elements:

• One or several meetup formats to bring people in loneliness together and support each other. The format should be documented in a way that individuals can easily organise their own meetups.

• Some kind of a “manifesto” or “12-step programme” with some rules that we commit to uphold individually and promote in these meetups.

• A documentation to help people understand their own loneliness and give ideas / advice on how to get out of it.

• An online platform to give visibility to the concept overall and to these meetups / local groups in particular, and to facilitate exchange of what works and what doesn’t.

A idea / project development group:

While the ideas around the meetups get more and more concrete, we want to remain open on new ideas and – who knows – still organise some hackathon. Or maybe even just encourage and stimulate research on the topic and condense this knowledge in a good documentation.

What lies ahead

By now our little group (there are about 5 to 7 people who participate regularly in our video hangouts) feels like an interesting little community and we feel motivated to go on, even if it is at a slow pace. The ideas get more and more concrete and we slowly feel like we can talk about it to others and grow the circle of involved people.

Some questions and things that seem important to us:

• Science based: Loneliness is a complex thing. To make this really impactful, we need to take latest knowledge into account. At some point we should actively reach out to researchers and get their input.

• Diversity: There is likely no “one size fits all” approach. Meaning there are things that will work for some but not for others. Or more concretely, for example for the meetups: We likely need to define different formats to get different people involved.

• A distributed organisation: We see a need for some form of an organisation, but for now we see this going more in the direction of a “movement” rather than an “organisation”. Eventually it would be good to have some kind of a formal entity. Simple things like creating a nice website may indeed require us to do some fundraising which in turn requires some form of an organisation.

• Anonymity: We want to give people the possibility to get involved anonymously.

• Lean and agile: These are buzzwords, but instead of building something big and then realise it doesn’t work, we want to keep things open, want to try out different things, and then develop on what actually works.

• Take things slowly: We all do this in our spare time. We have jobs that keep us busy. We don’t want to put ourselves under pressure to produce quick results, but maintain the satisfaction of working on something meaningful and that could develop into something big.