Every social feature I've ever used eventually turned into a scoreboard. It never announces itself that way. It starts as a nice idea — let people see each other — and then someone adds a count, because a count is easy to build and impossible to look away from, and now the nice idea has a high score.
The Forest is the part of Kodama where a small circle of people will be able to see each other's trees. It isn't in the app yet — we're still building it — but the rules were the first thing we settled, and the first rule was about what it would refuse to count.
There is no follower number. You don't have an audience; you have a few people who chose to plant near you, and the group is small on purpose. When someone joins, you don't see "3 of 8." You see eight small mounds of soil, and one of them grows a sapling. You can tell how full the circle is by looking at it, the way you can tell how full a room is by standing in the doorway. No numerals, because the numeral is the beginning of the scoreboard.
Nobody's tree has a like count. There's one gesture, called warmth, and you can send it to someone's tree once a day — it drifts over as a bit of light the next time they open the app. No total. No "12 people sent warmth." No leaderboard of whose tree got the most. You either felt something looking at a friend's month and said so, or you didn't. Keeping it scarce is what keeps it meaning something; a thing you can do infinitely stops being a gift.
And there are no streaks between friends, which is the one I feel most strongly about. The whole app already refuses to punish you for a quiet week. It would be a strange betrayal to then let your friends' app quietly note that you'd gone dark. So it doesn't. When you're away, your tree just rests in a soft haze, alive and unbothered, and no counter anywhere is ticking your absence.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to. Numbers in social apps aren't there for you. They're there because they're sticky — they pull you back to check whether the number moved. A count is a small open loop the app installs in your head. We decided the Forest could have the good part, which is being seen by people who care about you, without the hook, which is being scored by them.
What's left when you remove all the numbers is quieter than a feed and, I think, closer to the point. A few trees in a shared sky. You can tell, without being told, that someone had a full month or a thin one. You can send a little light. That's the entire mechanic, and it's enough.
Kodama is a one-word journal for iPhone — US$7.99 once, no subscription, no account, no ads. Your words never leave your phone. Get it on the App Store.