Finally just got invited to the new Digg.com “Groundbreakers” group!

I was so stoked when Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht did the reunion show for Diggnation last year. That was wild enough for me; I never thought I’d see the day. They joked about buying back Digg.com and making it an actual social network again but I never thought anything would come of it.

Glad I was wrong!

The Groundbreakers thing is a community (on Circle) that lets members watch the team rebuild Digg every step of the way and offer feedback, etc. so it’ll be pretty cool to watch it all unfold. There’s a general chat where everyone hangs out and it’s looking like all these other old school Digg users are just as hyped about it as I am.

I was so bummed out when Diggnation went off the air and Kevin announced he sold the website to a company called Betaworks. It was okay for a couple weeks (if memory serves) but then they promptly turned it into a curated link blog and it fell off the face of the earth almost immediately. To be fair, the website hadn’t been doing real great for a while before it even sold; Betaworks just drove the final nail into the coffin.

I mean don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love a good old fashioned link blog, but not one built from the ashes of an awesome social network. It’s like if they turned Reddit into Buzzfeed but shittier.

I had a little tech blog back then and I was so obnoxious about it. I trashed the new Digg so much one of the guys from Betaworks messaged me to tell me to chill the fuck out 😆

There’s a lot of talk of bringing it back as a more personal social network that isn’t ruled by algorithms and all the other gross stuff you get with trash like Facebook and ex-Twitter. No idea how things will turn out, but it sounds to me like the team’s vision aligns with a lot of core indie web values. I’m so fucking stoked!

The community is less than 24 hours old as I write this, so there’s not a whole heck of a lot to go on yet but the first screenshot looks pretty sick:

Screenshot of an early mockup of the new Digg.com

You can sign up for an invite at reboot.digg.com

Easy way to claim a good username before Digg.com is back!