ROMANIYAWhat this site is for
Why a social network for Roma people, when there are already several perfectly good ones for everybody.
The reasonable question about this site is why it should exist. Facebook works. Everybody is already there. Building another one is a strange way to spend your time.
Three answers, in increasing order of how much they matter.
The first: the general internet is not neutral about us
Search our name on any large platform and a good proportion of what comes back is hostile. Not fringe-hostile, but ordinary, casual, high-engagement hostile, in comment sections under news stories, in local groups, in the replies to anything about a settlement or an eviction. Roma who post openly on general platforms know exactly what that costs, and most either stop or stop mentioning it.
A place where the default assumption is that everyone here is one of ours changes what people are willing to say. That is not a small feature. It is most of the product.
The second: the things we need are specific
Family trees, because families were scattered by deportation, by war, and by four decades of people being moved around, and reassembling them is a genuine and common project rather than a hobby. A map, because "who is near me" is a real question when your nearest relatives are in another country. A bazaar, because trading among people who know each other is how a great deal of this has always worked. Music, because of everything in the piece above.
None of that is what a general platform is built for. You can approximate all of it badly on Facebook, and many people do.
The third: what happens to the record
This is the one that took the longest to think about properly.
A Roma community online is a list of Roma people. That is a document that has been requested, compiled and used before, in living memory, and the people who compiled it did not always say what it was for at the time. Anyone building something like this who has not thought about that has not thought about it.
So the decisions here run the other way from the usual ones. Profiles are not indexed by search engines. Posts are not indexed. The map is not indexed. Family trees are not indexed, because they name relatives who never agreed to anything. Private messages are never visible to administrators, and the moderation panel says so on the front of it. What search engines can see is the front of the house: this page, the writing, what the site is and who it is for.
That costs us reach. A site that let Google index everything would grow faster. It is the correct trade and it was not a close call.
Where it is
Small, and honestly so. Under a hundred people at the time of writing, most of whom know each other. Everything works: the communities, the messages, the trees, the map, the bazaar, the music, and lately a card room where the chips are free and cannot be bought, because a game among friends should stay a game.
It is free, there are no adverts sold against your attention to outside companies, and nothing here is for sale to anyone who wants to know who you are.
If you are Roma and you have read this far: it is your place more than it is anybody's. Come and use it.
