When I started HiFi Café, I did so convinced of one thing that now, a few months later, I find hard to maintain: I thought people wanted to communicate around this hobby. That they wanted their own participatory site, where they could show their gear, compare it with others', ask questions, answer others', set up DIY projects, write articles, share real experiences. I wanted to give people a space not just to consume, but to create. To think out loud and build something together.

And it turns out I was wrong. Or at least I was wrong about the majority.

After these months, I'm realizing something uncomfortable: a large part of people no longer understand the internet as a space for creation or thought, but as a space for consumption. And not just consumption, but free consumption. Most people want to spend time watching, and for the only effort required of them to be clicking to move to the next video or, at most, hitting "like".

You might say: but Josep, there are so many people commenting, discussing, eager to talk on YouTube. And it's true, that's exactly what misled me. I saw the comments, I saw the interest, and I took for granted that such a conversation would want its own site. What I didn't understand is that those people don't want to leave the platform. They don't want to go to a place where they have to choose, search for what interests them, register, write. They want to stay where they already are, where everything comes to them effortlessly.

At HiFi Café, I see it every day. It's incredibly difficult for registered users to end up participating. Once inside, activity is minimal: only a small percentage manages to contribute something firsthand, and of those, an even smaller percentage is encouraged to respond to what others have written. Creating lively threads, conversations that sustain themselves, is extremely difficult. And in the end, it's the same old story: the few who do have that participatory vision of the internet bear all the responsibility for keeping the community alive.

I believe the underlying problem is that most of us arrive at HiFi Café behaving as we do on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. And on those sites, let's be honest, we are nothing more than consumers of advertising containers. We are giving away our time to social networks that are, in reality, advertising management companies. That's why, when someone arrives at a site that asks for something more, they don't quite know what to do. They are used to the only requirement being to watch, like, and move on if they don't like it. A passive, comfortable internet, where you contribute nothing.

I don't want HiFi Café to be that, and that's why the site is constantly transforming. I'm removing unused functionalities to simplify navigation, improving the design and operation, setting up automations to make things easy for those who want to participate, and tirelessly searching for what motivates people to return and contribute something of their own. HiFi Café is not a finished site. It's a site that is cultivated.

But there are things that cannot be fixed with just good will and good design. The absence of an algorithm makes it very difficult, and this is where I've been pondering something for weeks that I wouldn't have even considered before. I had always wanted a site without an algorithm, because I associated algorithms with control and advertising. And yet, I'm starting to understand why they exist. Perhaps an internal algorithm could be designed, one that instead of managing advertising that benefits the business, would manage the real content from other users, what could truly interest each person. A kind of TikTok, yes, but a HiFi TikTok, made with what members create.

And this is where my heart aches. I think of the hunter-gatherer who spent the entire day looking for food, moving, choosing, and I see them replaced by someone who stays on the couch waiting for pizza to be delivered home. Many times it crosses my mind that it would be much easier to set up a comfortable and attractive delivery system, one that brings "home" to each person what the algorithm believes they want to consume. The HiFi TikTok. And participation problems would be over.

But no. At HiFi Café, we don't even settle for going hunting. Here we do something slower and more difficult: we plant the seed, we water it every day even if nothing is visible, and we wait. We wait with the faith of someone who knows that the earth eventually responds. And one day, when we had almost forgotten about it, the fruit arrives. And no one brought that fruit home to you: you made it grow. That's why it tastes different, that's why it's yours. All of this demands exactly what an algorithm promises to save you —time, hope, work, and enthusiasm— and in return, it gives you back the only thing no machine can ever give you: the certainty of having cultivated it with your own hands.

I don't intend to give in to that global trend that wants to turn us all into mere consumers. I want to be both at once: a producer and a consumer of quality experiences. I don't want substitutes in my life. And if you've made it to these last lines, NEITHER DO YOU. So we will continue working, we will continue sowing, and we will continue harvesting.