I miss when the internet was full of people I knew.

Remember when we used to poke each other on Facebook? Or throw virtual sheep at each other? We wrote testimonials on Orkut. Set status messages on MSN Messenger and checked who else was online.

Half the fun was just knowing someone was there.

I miss that. The feeling of entering a Yahoo chat room as a teenager and wondering who was on the other side of the avatar. Someone you knew nothing about, who you could end up talking to for hours.

I’ve been thinking about why being online doesn’t feel like that to me anymore.

I open Instagram now and everyone seems to be selling me something. Not sure if it’s just my feed, but I see more brands, ads and people explaining how I should live my life than I see my friends actually living theirs.

I still send my friends reels. They send me reels. Sometimes one is so specific that you know exactly who needs to see it.

That counts for something. It’s a small “I thought of you.”

But I also want to know what’s going on with them. What they’ve been thinking about. Whether something happened this week that they’re still trying to make sense of.

Somewhere along the way, social networks became social media. And I started feeling like the apps were far more interested in keeping my attention than helping me pay attention to people I cared about.

The annoying part is that they’re very good at it.

There have been evenings when sitting at home scrolling Twitter felt more interesting than meeting friends for a drink. I love my friends. But sometimes socialising became predictable. Same questions, same stories, same shit, different day.

Meanwhile, the internet always had something new.

I wanted some of that curiosity back in my real life. The feeling of a conversation going somewhere you couldn’t have predicted. Like when you’ve been drinking all night and it’s suddenly 2 AM, and you’re talking about life. About love. About something you hadn’t planned to tell anyone.

Those are the conversations I remember.

And I’ve always thought: could I build a social network that helped more of those happen?

My first idea was basically Twitter, but proximity based.

Because in Bangalore, proximity matters. You can really like someone and still barely see them because they live on the other side of the city. “We should catch up” becomes a plan that needs three calendars and a traffic forecast.

I wanted to discover people I found interesting who were actually close enough to become part of my life.

But what would we share? And what would make us curious enough about each other to eventually meet?

One idea I kept coming back to was a daily question.

Everyone gets the same one. Something fun, strange, occasionally a little deeper. What’s a movie you’ve watched so many times you could recite the opening? What could someone do without being asked that would make you feel loved?

You answer. Then you see what other people said.

Over time, you start recognising people. Someone always has a funny answer. Someone writes something that stays with you. Someone you assumed you had nothing in common with describes a feeling you know exactly.

You have a little more to go on than a photo and a job title.

That became the daily prompt on SoMo Club.

The idea is that you slowly get to know people around you, meet some of them at a café table, and keep learning about them afterwards. When someone you met on Sunday answers Tuesday’s question, there’s already a person and a conversation attached to that answer.

And maybe the next time you meet, you have somewhere to pick up.

I’m still figuring out how to build this well. But I know the feeling I’m trying to get back to.

Seeing someone online and being glad they’re there. Being curious about what they have to say. Getting to know them well enough that, eventually, you want to close the laptop and go meet them.

Preferably somewhere nearby. This is still Bangalore.

Tarun Sasikumar is the founder of somo club.