Are.na

Are.na is: for researchers, artists, designers, knowledge collectors and autodidacts.

People describe Are.na as "playlists, but for ideas" or an "Internet memory palace." Pinterest for nerds.

Are.na is free for up to 200 total blocks. Members pay a small subscription to help maintain the platform, and continue feature development. In exchange for your support, we offer unlimited blocks to subscribers and a growing set of extra features and tools. We are the only social media company whose only customers are the people who use it -- there's no ads, no tracking, no analytics, no AI-driven feeds, and no growth-hacking metrics.

Are.na's mission is to build a self-sustained community for shared knowledge. In 2018 we ran a crowdfunding campaign where 850 people invested on Are.na, ~75% of those who invested were already members of our platform. We rely on no other external funding.

Development began in the early 2010s when Broskoski collaborated with Rhizome's John Michael Boling and Sapient's Stuart Moore on prototypes for containerizing knowledge into "informational building blocks." Artists Damon Zucconi and Dena Yago from K-HOLE later joined, leading to the official launch as an ad-free alternative to platforms like Facebook, emphasizing collaboration without likes or shares.

The platform draws from Ted Nelson's hypertext projects, particularly Xanadu, and his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, aiming to create an open-ended tool for linking ideas like early hypertext systems. It emerged partly as a response to the decline of services like del.icio.us after its acquisition by Yahoo, prioritizing mindfulness, focus, and interdisciplinary inspiration over algorithmic feeds. This approach fosters a space for artists and designers to build contextual connections between saved content