Are.na Annual call for submissions, mobile app in the works, and more
Hi,
Today (the day this was written) was perfectly clear and temperate. More green all around, and look, the light is changing!
We’re listening to this Mark Isham song and thinking about work, patience, longevity, discipline, trust… What have you been listening to? What have you been thinking about?
New Mobile App in the Works
We’re at the beginning stages of re-building our mobile app. This is our big project right now.
Remember Sander? We replaced our then-existing web application with a completely rebuilt, from-scratch version that looked nearly identical.
Our new mobile app is not quite the same approach, but it will feel very familiar to anyone who uses the web app because it will use the same design language. The similarity to Sander is that we are focusing on performance.
Because of this, it finally makes sense for us to spend some time improving the mobile web, which will eventually translate to the mobile app. This is what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks.
All to say, if you’re a fan of new experiences, try saving Are.na to your home screen.
Call for submissions: Are.na Annual Vol. 7
As you may know, each year we publish an anthology of writing by the people of Are.na called the Are.na Annual. Each year we ask for submissions around a given theme that take root in a channel. This year, we’ve landed on the theme pool, and we’re now open for submissions.
Pool as in: a quiet place in a stream; a gathering of people, resources, liquid, or light; to contribute to a common effort; a game of billiards; a place for swimming.
Read more about the theme and submission process here. Submit here by May 23, 2025 midnight EST. And if you’d like to take a look (or add to) a shared repository of resources and ideas for the taking, please do so here.
We’re also looking for an assistant editor to help put together this year’s Annual. Here is the job posting with further information.
Naive Yearly x Are.na
In the last newsletter we mentioned our editorial series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the quiet, odd, and poetic web. Now we are nearing the end of it, and we have seven really excellent pieces to show for it. These essays all came out of the talks at the conference, which took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September 2024. All of the speakers are people we admire, and who engage with the web in interesting, idiosyncratic, and critical ways. Those include:
Tiger Dingsun with a Jungian reading of Minecraft
Charmaine Li on collective dreaming
Kaloyan Kolev on preserving the Bulgarian web.
Agnes Cameron on what images can do
Reuben Son on second screens and background music
Kim Kleinert with an essay in the footnotes
Daniel Murray on the mythopoetic web
And don’t miss the last in the series, publishing this Thursday: Vida Rucli and Robida Collective on spatial poetry.
Community News
We’ve got lots of news to share from the community, as collected through our Community News channel (which you are welcome to add to).
Nico Chilla made a tool that displays Are.na channel indexes as grouped by their owners’ “index keys.” For the uninitiated, a channel index is a view of your profile where you can see all your channels alphabetically. After we added this view, people on Are.na started making ad-hoc “index keys” — titling their channels with symbols that correspond to categories or subjects of interest as a way of grouping them together. (Here’s a helpful breakdown of this practice.) Nico’s tool is such a pleasant way to explore people’s personal taxonomies, and might help you develop your own as well.
Itay Dreyfus interviewed Are.na CEO Charles Broskoski for the niche design zine and explored gardening as a metaphor for building software on their Substack Product Identity.
Elliott Cost wrote about using an Are.na channel as a camera roll and the making of the website version: camera.elliott.computer. We love seeing people’s photo channels.
On the podcast Tools for Time Traveling, creative director Alex Maeland talked about how he uses Are.na and his own curation methods. It’s a nice intro to Are.na if you’re looking for a place to start.
Community Guides to Are.na
Speaking of good introductions to Are.na that we had nothing to do with and are incredibly appreciative of, we’ve been collecting videos of people giving personal walk throughs of how to use Are.na. You can find them in the channel Community Guides to Are.na.
Some recent examples include Kathy Pham’s “a beginner’s guide to are.na” and Anna Howard’s Wild Geese episode “how to fall down a curiosity rabbit hole & reconnect to your creativity.”
Roadmap
As always, you can check out our roadmap page which goes into the features we're building, our long-term goals, and our current numbers.
There are so many places you can spend your attention, and we’re touched that you spent it reading this letter.
The Are.na Team