I miss the internet that wasn't trying to sell me something.

Club Penguin. Habbo Hotel. Animal Jam. A decade of small, slightly weird online worlds built for people to just be somewhere together. Almost all of them are gone now: bought out, shut down, or turned into something that needed my card details before I could have fun.

The Commons exists to bring that back. Somewhere open and free, where safety is the baseline rather than a feature, and where nobody's trying to extract money from the people who show up.

Whatever else changes along the way, that priority does not move. The social good of everyone using it comes first, not the ways it could be sold.