With this article I've been here on Iperntity for about two weeks. I have to say that I am blown away by the welcoming spirit and true community.

But what really caused me to write this article, is that yesterday I found a surpise message that another Club (paid) member gifted me with Club membership. This really became emotional to me, that someone who hardly knows me would invest financially in my participation here, and to my furture creative success.

Back when I was on here for about two day's, this member sent me a note to let me know how they recognized me from Flickr and to welcome me here. We exchanged a short chat, and a few picture comments, and I thought that would be it. Not so.

It turns out this member too was gifted a Club membership and, well, they gave me the okay to share with you their words:

"Two days ago I checked my email, as you do now, and to my utter astonishment discovered that a complete stranger had gifted me a club membership subscription. Totally out of the blue. I had no idea who this man was. I had never met, nor spoken to him before.

What a guy! What a place this is! He told me he did it because, “I like your style and look forward to seeing where you go with it next”, and, “I’m keen to support ipernity”. ... I made a promise to him, there and then, that I would repay his generosity, and the generous welcome I have received from others in the short time I have been here.

As it happens I had already decided that I would like to contribute to the upkeep of this wonderful community. I can see that they need, and deserve every penny they can get. I was just waiting to see what transpired from the restructuring of the subscription plans. Now, I don’t have to wait. And now neither do you.

It’s a very hard, cynical and selfish world we live in, but the warmth and kindness of these people has restored my faith in the innate decency of human beings. I am more than happy to add my contribution to ipernity’s coffers, and to share my good fortune."

I couldn't say that better myself! And I too intend to pass on the 'blessing'. All this caused a daydream: what if the only way you could get a Club membership is that another member gifts it to you? I don't think really this would fully work, as this might cause gaming the system, but it was a nice thought.

But how does a welcoming online community like this happen?

Anyone who puts Ipernity together with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, lets make one thing clear: these platforms have come to be called social media. The reason that they called it social media is mostly because you can sell media. But that is not what Ipernity is. It is an online community. There is a difference.

You see, social media today is an extortion of sorts of the online communities across the web. And to fix them you almost have to start over. Go back to the founding principles, without compromising the terms you promised your present members. Because with a true online community, like Ipernity, means that everybody who is here is not marketing. They are having conversations. They are known to each other, and they are being part of the community they are participating.

The power of an online community is where many people feel more at home online than in their actual hometown. Or where the tool is not as important as the conversation and the connections that create them, becuase, many soclal media platforms do this the other way around.

And the foundation that builds onto an online photo sharing community is how today more pictures are made with a smart phone camera than all the pictures in the history of photography - and nobody has any idea where to put these photographs (for eternity). From this you create culture that sticks.

The tone you set from the begining is the tone you keep. And I can tell you from day one here on Ipernity, the number of greetings I found and the welcoming spirit, was a pleasant surprise. And this tone here is creating a hospitable climate.

In other words, the members here own the website, and because Ipernity is building a meaningful people-oriented internet, to include the community in decision-making, the members have a real stake in what happens inside their society here. The distiction here is the difference between members who care about the health of the community, and those who only care about themselves.

So when one member gifts another with Club membership, it can be like a dream come true. For example, many people I know who grow up wanting to be a writer or an artist, often times nobody in their family, or society, thinks that is a viable career choice. So these people who are given this inspired creativity from this community of members, would actually have the encouragement and the possibility of making their work possible.

And Ipernity provides this community with good communicaitons tools, good manners and good examples from day one: Picture Threads, Groups and Discussions, and Blogging. Not to mention the discussion threads on the membership newsletter blog.

I've participated in many social media and photo sharing platforms, and the probelm with many of them is they don’t know who they are: they are trying to ecompass it all. And that doesn't work, because you want to be part of a community that shares your values, and the systems that you believe, not one with a compas that makes you tolorate morals that you don't.


Frank J Casella
www.ipernity.com/user/frankjcasella