Introducing Loum

Meet a social network for your local communities

We all share the common urge to belong to something bigger then ourselves. From the dawn of mankind people have always tended to gather in groups and communities, mainly defined by sharing the common habitats. The cavemen naturally understood that being a part of a community makes life much more meaningful. It lessens the burden of hard work and magnifies the gaiety of shared holidays. It facilitates exchange of news and passing knowledge to next generations, it makes life more meaningful, by connecting people with neat strings of love, respect and caring. It’s not surprising that the most dreadful punishment was excluding a person from the community, which condemned a person to an anguished and lingering agony from starvation, cold or the claws of a predator.

Carl Sagan has beautifully put this need of belonging through the words of an alien in his ‘Contact’:

You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

Inspired by these challenging goals, today we are proud to launch Loum, a service that helps you to feel connected and relevant.

What is Loum?

Loum is a social network for local communities.

It connects you to people and goings-on in places you care about. Whether you want to explore your college news, to propose your co-workers going to bar after work or to find interesting people on campus, Loum is the perfect companion.

Loum makes you a part of something bigger that each of us alone. It creates a special level of connectedness between people. And that’s what we all seek in life — to feel connected and relevant, to be a participant of the life around us.

Communities

In today’s abundance of content it’s hard to find something valuable — even people, who you follow, share a lot of unrelevant posts. This problem inspired us to create a different model of sharing content.

At the core of Loum lies a community-based type of sharing, which lets you to get all the relevant news no matter if you follow a person who posted it or not — by subscribing to the crowdcontributed communities, you will never miss what’s important. And simultaneously you will not get irrelevant post of people you know. It’s a lot less clutter. You decide what is interesting for you.

Basically, community is a decentralised crowdcontributed page that aggregates all posts added to it and which is followed by people who are interested in the content that will be shared through it. So when you share a post by adding it to the community, even if followers of that community don’t know you personally and don’t follow you, but your current post is relevant to them and presents an interest, they’ll see it.

You don’t have to follow hundreds of people to know what’s happening — simply follow communities, you’re interested in and all the relevant post, shared to them, will appear right at your timeline. We know though, when it concerns your loved ones, everything is relevant. So we made an opportunity to follow the closest and dearest people in your life, so that you’ll see all the posts they share (regardless of what community their posts were shared to, if any) and all the posts by other people featuring them.

Your opinion is valued

Due to such type of sharing Loum also makes your opinion valued — you will get audience and immediate reaction of other people by posting relevant and interesting content through communities, no matter how famous you are or how many people follow you personally. You are totally free in your expression, simply share things that would be valuable for members the community you post to.

Freedom of choice

We’ve created Loum to empower you with a freedom of choice. You control your privacy. You are no more bound by your identity or alias. To give you the power of saying things, you can’t for some reason tell on behalf of your personal identity, we have created an ability to share things anonymously. All your activity on Loum, whether it be sharing some news, leaving a comment in the discussion or following people and communities, may be either anonymous or public.

Remember one of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant quotes:

‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’

We deeply believe that ability to freely tell the truth, without being bound by your identity should an integral part of any social service. Although, mind that we have created Loum to be an instrument of discovery not the instrument of bulling, so offensive content won’t be tolerated. Elbert Hubbard, a prominent American writer and philosopher at the edge of XIXth and XXth centuries, once told that ‘responsibility is the price of freedom’. This quotation perfectly reflects what we feel about our service. We depend on you to be genuine and truthful. And let freedom ring!

Our mission

We founded Loum with a mission to help people feel connected and relevant while bringing them closer to each other in their communities.