Serendipity — Amin

Serendipity1 is a word from a Persian fairy tale. the word means finding something valuable unexpectedly. it isn’t just random chance. imagine that you are in a prairie and want to take a picture of your friend, just before you press the shutter, a rare bird enters the frame and you take a picture of it. an ordinary picture becomes a wonderful one and this is called serendipity. there is one hidden assumption to this story: you have to take the picture in the first place. this kind of randomness is when you are doing an act and then an unplanned fortune happens.<br>I tried this concept before. a Persian Telegram bot called RandomLettersBot. it had a basic idea. you write a letter and throw it in the ocean. it came from a childhood fantasy: every time that I stood on a beach I wondered what if a bottle came from the sea with a letter. from a person far, far away.<br>the letters people drop in the bot will be delivered to a random person whom you can’t know. neither the sender nor the receiver knows who is on the other side. I sent it to only my close friends so we can send letters to each other. today more than 13000 people use it to send and receive letters. without censorship or fear of judgment. it’s the first attempt to bring serendipity to the internet.<br>I have written a blog since I was 17. a blog called dissolve. dissolve is a technique in cinema. an image will disappear slowly and another image takes its place. it is used to show the passage of time. I named it dissolve because I wanted each post to become a snapshot of who I was at that moment. to see how I change over time. sadly the era of blogs passed. mostly in the Persian community and around the world. most of bloggers I knew have migrated to telegram channels or do not write anymore.<br>As blogs faded away, social media replaced them. posts are optimized for algorithms—from search engines to recommendation feeds—in order to be seen. I found my best friends on blogs because people write blogs differently from their X account or reddit or substack. blogs reveal more of who people really are. and how they really think. I built waldi on top of two concepts:<br>- blogging<br>- serendipity<br>a blog that you can write on it or read it plus a random post daily from a stranger. every post deserves to be seen by at least 100 strangers not because of an algorithm, but simply because it exists. without any algorithm. we should let the randomness be. from a feed that is not curated and everyone can have a chance to be seen. the most excited part for me. I can randomly find some people that I would like and I like to follow them.<br>so here I am again. I started my english blog for the second time. let’s see what serendipity brings me. through waldi’s strangers.<br>The name comes from Serendip, an old Persian name for Sri Lanka ↩