Introducing Synnoia

An online workspace for collaborative reading and conversation

Earlier this week, I wrote about how reading the same book with other people provides a tangible, shared space for dialogue, and can even serve as a mediator of sorts for differences in ideology and worldview. I ended by saying I would soon reveal a project I’ve been working on to help facilitate this kind of conversation. I named it Synnoia, and it is essentially an online workspace for shared reading and discussion.

Many online reading groups run on some combination of apps and social media platforms that were neither designed for active group reading nor built to work well together to this end. A common scenario looks like this: people searching their desktops or trying to download a PDF right before a meeting so they’re prepared to find referenced passages; scrolling through group chats trying to remember a point they made discussing a particular section the week before so they can present it to the group; and feeling generally unsure about their fellow readers’ ideas about the text since the last discussion. What this turns into is a book club meeting spent trying to reconstruct the threads of a conversation that has played out in fragments and is difficult to recover as a coherent whole. After all, the text itself is the one thing everyone is supposed to be gathered around, but it is the one place the conversation never quite lands.

My goal with Synnoia is to put the discussion back on the page. You read inside a shared room built around one document, and when a line or passage stirs an idea, you annotate it, create a thread anchored to the text, where your thoughts wait for whoever comes along to reply. Whether you’re reading at the same time or weeks apart, the margin keeps the conversation. And when you meet to discuss with your group, there is a structured set of notes available to everyone to reference directly alongside the text.

I have built a small library of public-domain works ready to open (Augustine, Boethius, Chesterton, Dostoevsky, MacDonald, among others), or you can bring your own PDF. For anyone who is interested in trying it out this summer, Pro is on me for three months, and anyone you invite to your rooms can always join and participate for free.

If you have a group, or even the beginnings of one, reply (or DM) and let me know so I can get you set up. Or if you’re reading alone, open something from the shelf and start taking notes; and whoever you invite later can engage with you as they read. Check it out at https://synnoia.app.

P.S. I am always open to feedback, feature requests, complaints, or any combination of these. Just let me know, and I’m happy to talk.

— Johnathon