Why we're building Taulu

There used to be a bulletin board.

It was layered deep with flyers. A chess club. A band looking for a bassist. A 5K nobody you knew was running. Half of it wasn’t for you. But every so often something was, and you’d write down the information you needed and actually go. That’s how you found things you’d never have gone looking for. Not through anyone you already knew. Through a piece of paper on a wall, put there by a stranger.

Somewhere in the years after, those walls started to thin out. The board didn’t get replaced by a better board. It got replaced by a group chat — and a group chat is a different thing entirely.

What a bulletin board actually did

A sociologist named Ray Oldenburg had a name for the places those boards lived in: third places — the ones that aren’t home and aren’t work. The cafe, the library, the barbershop, the corner bar. He argued they were where informal public life actually happens, and that a community’s health depends on them more than we notice until they’re gone.

Here’s the part people miss: the board didn’t just hold the plan. It’s where you found it in the first place. It handed you things you didn’t know to look for, from people you’d never met. That function — discovery, out in the open, low-stakes, in a place you already were — is the thing that quietly disappeared.

We’re spending the loss down in real time

In 2003, the average American spent about an hour a day with friends face to face. By 2020, it was twenty minutes. For people under twenty-five, it dropped by nearly seventy percent. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General put out a formal advisory warning that being socially disconnected carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day — and that about half of American adults report experiencing loneliness.

Half of us. Twenty minutes a day. That’s a country slowly forgetting how to run into each other.

The thing we replaced it with can’t do the job

The group chat is good at the plans you’d make anyway, with the people already in your phone. It is useless for the plans you wouldn’t have made, with the people you haven’t met yet. And those second ones are where a life actually widens. The people who change your week are usually not the ones already in your contacts.

The feed is worse. A feed is built to keep you looking at it. A bulletin board was built to get you to leave — to go somewhere, meet someone, do the thing. Those are opposite goals. One optimizes for your attention; the other hands you an address and a time.

We spent fifteen years pouring our social lives into tools designed to hold us in place, and then wondered why we stopped going anywhere.

So we rebuilt the board

Taulu is that bulletin board, rebuilt for a world running out of walls to pin things to.

An event is a poster. The people and groups you share it with are the boards it’s pinned to. Some posters go up where only your friends will see them — you and the people you already have, coordinating the easy way. Some go up in public, where a stranger nearby can find them, follow the board, and show up. The same way you used to.

And it works like a board, not like a feed. You don’t get an endless ranked stream engineered to keep you scrolling. You go looking — by place, by interest, by name — and you find what you were actually looking for, plus a few things you weren’t. Then you close the app and go. Getting you off the screen and into a room is the entire point.

If Taulu is doing its job, you’re not on it very long.