Christopher Meiklejohn

“Don’t let a heavy one hold back the dawn in you” — Goose, “(dawn)”

The Third Place

There’s a concept in sociology called the “third place” — not home, not work, but the place where you go to find your people. The coffee shop. The record store. The bar after the show. It’s where community happens.

The internet used to be that place.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, there were communities built entirely around taste. Makeoutclub. MySpace. Forums with names you’ve probably forgotten. Your profile wasn’t a highlight reel of your life — it was a declaration of what you were into. The music you listed, the films you referenced, the books in your sidebar. People found each other through that. You’d stumble onto someone’s page because they listed the same obscure record you loved, and suddenly you had a new friend in a city you’d never been to. The social graph was built on shared taste, not shared geography.

For a while, Twitter picked up that torch. By the mid-2010s, I had friends all over the world — people who followed me because they were into the same things I was into. I’d travel for research and work to Europe, Australia, the UK, wherever, and I could post and there would always be someone up for a drink, a show, a conversation. It was global and it was real. The connections were built on interests, and they worked.

Then that got destroyed too.

Twitter got bought and the community scattered. Instagram and Facebook were already ad machines, optimizing for engagement over connection. Mastodon was too federated for anyone to find each other. Bluesky came too late, after everyone had already given up. Letterboxd was a glimmer of hope — a platform built around a specific kind of taste — but it devolved into ironic one-liners engineered for laughs and would-be film critics writing for an audience instead of a community.

And for music? Nothing. A total void.

The third place doesn’t exist anymore. Not for people who actually care about what they’re listening to, watching, and reading.

Proof It Works

Here’s the thing: I know the third place can work online, because one community already does it in the physical world every single day.

The jam band community — my community — knows how to build this. They have shakedowns. They have lot meetups. They organize their entire lives around shows. They travel. People wander on and off tour. Strangers become friends because they’re standing next to each other for three nights in a row. The social infrastructure is already there. The culture of gathering around shared experience is already there.

The tools just haven’t caught up.

Reddit requires constant refreshing if you want anything resembling a live conversation. Facebook groups are merch spam wastelands. The dedicated platforms that do exist — Phantasy Tour, various setlist sites — are siloed. Each one focuses on a single band or a single function. There’s no unified identity. You’re a different person on every platform. And most of them haven’t evolved technologically since 2008.

I know this because I lived it. I spent ten years in grad school, and when I finished, I had no community. Not really. People didn’t even say goodbye when I left. A decade of my life, and it just… ended.

Then I got back into the jam band world, and something completely different happened. People I’d long disconnected with welcomed me back like no time had passed. Patrick, someone I hadn’t talked to in twenty years. Sara, someone I’d sold tickets to online. I made friends through friends of friends, the way you do on the lot. I made friends standing next to some Dallas fans at a show during the NBA playoffs when Dallas was playing Boston, and I was wearing a Celtics jersey. That’s it. That’s all it took. Standing next to strangers who were into the same thing, and suddenly you’re not strangers anymore.

No other community in my life has worked like that. The jam band world doesn’t care where you went to school or what you do for a living. It cares whether you were at the show. It cares about the music. And that’s enough.

COVID Separated Us. We Never Came Back.

The pandemic made all of this worse. It separated us physically, and we never fully recovered. We got distant from each other in ways we’re still reckoning with. The platforms we had didn’t help — they made it worse, feeding us outrage and ads while we sat alone.

Couch tour became a lifeline during that time. Watching a show from home, knowing other people were watching too, trying to find each other in Reddit threads and group texts. But it was held together with duct tape. There was no place that actually served that experience.

That’s what I want to build. A bridge between the physical and the virtual. The people in the crowd and the people at home should be in the same community, sharing the same experience. And if you’re home alone on a Tuesday night watching a stream — you’re not alone. You’re part of something.

Couch touring shows is just one version of this. Book clubs were the original shared cultural experience. Shared movie watching is the next. The format extends infinitely because the core is always the same: people experiencing culture together, regardless of where they physically are. A global community of people who love media.

Facebook is a dinosaur. It doesn’t provide anything useful for this. It harvests your data, sells it to advertisers, and gives you merch spam groups in return.

Extending Beyond the Lot

The jam band community is the proof of concept, but the vision is bigger.

The same energy that makes shakedowns work — people organizing around the things they love, sharing experiences in real time, building identity through taste — applies to anyone who cares deeply about culture. The person who wants to talk about the Jarmusch film they just watched, not post an ironic quip for engagement. The person spinning a new album who wants to know what their friends think, not get an algorithmic recommendation from a company that’s also selling them headphones. The person who just finished a novel and wants to find others who read it, not write an Amazon review into the void.

Zabriskie starts with the jam band world because that community is ready for it. They already have the culture. They just need a place that works. But the thesis is universal: anyone whose identity is shaped by what they consume — music, film, books — deserves a third place built around that.

The Opposite of Everything

Zabriskie is the opposite of every social network that exists.

We don’t want everyone on the planet to join. In Careless People, you can trace the path of platforms that pursued growth indefinitely, at all costs, and watch exactly where it leads — the product hollows out, the community dies, the ads take over. We’re not walking that path.

We’re not selling ads. We’re not optimizing for engagement. We actually want you to get off the site. The feed is finite — you read it, you’re done, you go live your life. There are no free-form text posts. Every single post requires a piece of culture — an album, a film, a book, a show — a rating, and your actual thoughts. We are about culture.

Discovery works differently here too. You want to see posts from people you don’t know. You want to meet people organically, based on taste. But not through algorithmic matching — not the dating app model, not the “people you may know” sidebar. Taste proliferates through the network the way it does in real life: through people.

Think about high school. You’re walking down the hall and you see someone wearing a shirt from a band you love. You don’t know them. They might be in a completely different social world. But you recognize something about them instantly. That moment of connection based on taste, without an algorithm, without a recommendation engine, without anyone engineering the encounter — that’s how discovery should work. And nothing online does it.

Zabriskie does.

Not a Startup

I should be clear about what this isn’t. Zabriskie isn’t a startup. There’s no pitch deck. No Series A. No growth targets. No exit strategy. Nobody is looking to flip this to Google in three years. There are no revenue goals and no KPIs around daily active users.

This is about reclaiming the internet as a place. The third place. Building community, not building a business.

The internet used to be somewhere you went to find your people. Then it became something that was done to you — feeds engineered to keep you scrolling, platforms optimized to extract value from your attention, your taste data packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

Zabriskie is a rejection of all of that. We’re not looking for revenue or growth. We’re looking to reclaim the internet as our third space and build community.

And to put our money where our mouth is: Zabriskie is becoming a non-profit. Not because it’s a clever tax strategy. Because it’s the only structure that’s honest about what we’re doing. Community over money. Full stop. Every decision gets made with one question: does this make the community better? Not: does this grow the user base? Not: does this increase engagement? Not: does this make the metrics look good for investors?

There are no investors. There never will be.

I’m building this on my own. Funding it myself. Writing code on nights and weekends because I believe in this. There’s no team of fifty engineers. There’s no office. There’s just me, doing the work, because I think this matters. And I think this is the only way it can be done honestly — if it’s built by someone who actually wants to use it, not by someone who wants to monetize it.

This is the only way to free ourselves from the oppression of existing social networks. You don’t reform platforms that were designed from the ground up to extract value from your attention. You don’t petition them to be better. You build something new. You take it back.

We’re building this because something has been missing from the internet for a long time, and people want it back. The third place. A space built around taste, around culture, around the things that actually matter to you. A place where you show up not because an algorithm pulled you in, but because your people are there.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I owe thanks to the people who made this real. Patrick and Mary are my partners in this — they’ve been instrumental in shaping the design of this platform from day one. Every screen, every decision about how it should feel, has their fingerprints on it. This is as much theirs as it is mine. Sara and Charles have been there from the beginning, beta testing features, breaking things, and telling me when something didn’t work. You don’t build a community platform alone. You build it with your community.

Rick Mitarotonda once said that if something brings you passion, you should work as hard as you can at it — that the results, the success, it’s not about that. That’s exactly how I feel about Zabriskie. This isn’t about metrics or outcomes. It’s about the work. It’s about building something that matters to the people who use it.

If any of this resonates with you — if you’ve been looking for the place that used to exist and doesn’t anymore — come find us at zabriskie.app. Bring your taste. Bring your people. The dawn is coming. Let’s build the third place together.

“I feel it all in our hands, in a rising sun” — Goose, “(dawn)”

Zabriskie. Where taste resonates.