Seriously, what is Month Friend?
At the beginning of each month, participants are randomly paired.
Every day, you will receive an email with a writing prompt, encouraging you to share something with your Month Friend. You have until midnight to send your message: the next day, your Month Friend receives your message, and you receive theirs.
That’s it! One message per day, to one person, for one month.
Rules:
You can share as much or as little with your Month Friend as you’d like. Month Friend is an experience guided by you, and you decide what kind of Month Friendship you have. We encourage you to send a message as often as you can! Even a short message every day helps connect you to your Month Friend.
It is not required that you respond to the day’s prompt. Prompts are there to guide discussion, and include questions from “What’s your favorite kind of soup?” to “What are you most proud of?” Feel free to ask your Month Friend questions, respond to their messages, or ignore the prompt entirely.
You may not send threats, harassment, or explicit content through Month Friend. Failure to follow this rule can result in suspension from Month Friend. If you think someone has broken this rule, please contact us at contact@monthfriend.com.
Month Friend is not intended to lead to longer-term interactions. This doesn’t mean it can’t! You and your Month Friend can have any kind of relationship you like. However, you are never obligated to share anything more with your Month Friend than your chosen name.
You are allowed (and encouraged!) to ask your Month Friend follow-up questions and learn more about them. However, if you request more information from your Month Friend, and they decline, you are not allowed to ask why, or continue requesting. That is the end of discussion: don’t take it personally. You should always feel able to decline a request from your Month Friend without repercussions.
Month Friend starts on the first of each month. Sign up for next month here.
Other Frequently Asked Questions:
What’s the point of Month Friend?
Most other ways of meeting people, especially online, give you lots of options that you don’t have to spend a lot of time with. This can feel overwhelming, putting a lot of pressure on everyone to be as appealing and attention-getting as possible.
So, Month Friend eliminates that pressure. You don’t get a choice in who your Month Friend is, and you’re stuck together for a whole month.
This isn’t necessarily a better way of interacting. In fact, by anything you could measure, it’s probably worse. But we feel there are parts of human connection that are hard to measure, that can only appear in an un-optimized, deliberately clunky way of communicating.
In the end, Month Friend isn’t meant to do anything: it just is. You can call it a social network, or a journal, or an art project. It might be amusing, or annoying. It might be a profound experience that changes you in ways you can’t imagine. We make no guarantees that it will lead to love, or long-term friendship, or even a meaningful connection, but it will at least be different.
The closest feeling we’d like to replicate is those intense friendships you form at summer camp, where you’re thrown together with a stranger and share everything with them, even though you’re not quite sure if you really get along and never see each other again. But Month Friend is whatever you and your friend make of it.
What if I don’t get along with my Month Friend?
There’s always a chance you and your Month Friend just don’t get along. Though we do what we can to encourage participation, we cannot guarantee that your Month Friend will respond regularly, or at all. Please try your best to stick with Month Friend! Feel free to treat it as a diary or a daily writing exercise. Ultimately, the random nature of Month Friend is a feature, not a bug; if you and your Month Friend click, it will be a really interesting experience, and if you don’t, there’s always next month.
If you feel that you are being threatened or harassed through the platform, please contact us at contact@monthfriend.com
Is Month Friend doing anything with my data?
We are not selling, aggregating, or analyzing any of the information in your Month Friend messages. Currently, we ask for optional age, gender, and location data for basic internal analysis, and because these may become matching criteria in future months. Providing this information will always be optional.
Messages sent through Month Friend are visible to us as well as your Month Friend, though we have no intention of reading Month Friend messages. Do keep this in mind, though, and for many reasons, don’t send anything through Month Friend you wouldn’t be comfortable with a stranger seeing.
Is this an AI thing?
None of the prompts or your Month Friend’s responses are made using generative AI. Your Month Friend will always be another Month Friend user.
Who are you?
The real Month Friend is the Month Friends we made along the way. But the people behind the website and prompts live in Massachusetts.