Tending To Our Dark Forest: What’s Next?
APRIL 25TH, 2026
Studio Slowcore is preparing to open our Dark Forest space to new members. (It’s not quite ready yet, though we’ve made one post publicly visible as a test, and this post is also serving as our first email sent to all our early members directly through DFOS. It will then live on as a public post on our DFOS, and we'll email it to our Substack subscribers too).
As part of that process, we’ve dropped the name Return On Attention from our work.
With the Slowcore HQ migration (Farcaster —> Substack —> DFOS), we’ve realized that the RoA community group-mind entity as we’ve known it may have run its course.
The name doesn’t seem to fit what’s been seeded in the substrate of our Dark Forest. The space has shifted more toward a publishing/curation studio and away from the community roundtable discussion that fueled our Farcaster and Substack days. Since our approach prioritizes form-context fit, we’re going with the flow, because the context is smarter than us.
That said, members of the former RoA group chat from the Farcaster days are still welcome to join our Dark Forest space anytime. We’re still happy to work with them as contributors. We’ll gift them access to our private chat space so we can compare notes whenever we get nerd-sniped. We’ll also proudly keep the RoA name as-is on our Substack.
But those who find out about RoA through Substack — where we published many of our previous deep-dive convos — might be expecting something more like an active community discussion forum if they join us in our new HQ. We want to be clear that there’s something new emerging in our Dark Forest.
We’ll still write about the concept of return on attention, particularly as it relates to economic reciprocity for writers and artists. But going forward, we’ll write under the Studio Slowcore moniker only.
We’re also shifting more of our attention to Slowcore Press, our incipient publishing entity, as we prepare for our first Metalabel release.
Our Dark Forest will continue to cater to sustained-attention interests. It’s the new home for the Public Domain Art Portal, for example, and it will soon serve as a place to dive deep into the concept of slowcore value flow — an ethos and conceptual framework we’ve been developing to explain how we think about value, and how we prefer to work together.
We’re excited to share more news soon.
Graphics by @bias
