Why I built Mindfuse

The short version of why I built Mindfuse is this: we have never had more ways to reach each other, and we have never understood each other less. I spent a long time trying to convince myself those two facts were unrelated. They are not.

The thing I couldn't stop noticing

I'm Dutch. I grew up in a small country that has always survived by talking to bigger ones — trading, negotiating, listening. So I notice when conversation breaks. And for years I'd had a low, persistent sense that something about how we talk to each other had quietly gone wrong. I have a phone that can connect me to almost any human alive in under a second. I have apps full of people. And yet the actual texture of understanding — the feeling of a worldview shifting an inch because of something a real person said — had become rare. Not gone. Rare.

What I eventually understood is that social media never connected us to different worldviews at all. It connected us to a flattering mirror. Every feed is tuned to show you more of what you already are — more of your taste, your politics, your tribe, your jokes. It feels like a window onto the world. It is actually a very high-resolution photograph of yourself, refreshed every few seconds. You can scroll for an hour and meet no one.

The moment

The specific moment was unremarkable, which is probably why it stuck. I was in a taxi in Lisbon, jet-lagged, and the driver — a man from Cape Verde — started telling me, unprompted, why he'd left, what he missed, what he thought Europeans got completely wrong about home. We disagreed about half of it. I've forgotten the route entirely. I have not forgotten the conversation. By the time we arrived I understood something about a place I'd never been, from a person I'd never see again, in a way no article had ever managed.

And it hit me on the pavement, paying the fare: this happens to all of us, and it always happens by accident. The barber. The seatmate on a long flight. The stranger at a bus stop in a city where you don't speak the language. The most genuinely perspective-altering conversations of most people's lives arrive completely unscheduled, with people they have no relationship with — and then we go home and spend the evening reading opinions from people exactly like us. I wanted to build the opposite of accidental. I wanted to make that taxi ride something you could choose.

Why voice

I chose voice before I chose almost anything else, and I chose it because text lies by omission. Text is edited. It's the version of you that had time to think, delete, and reconsider. The voice can't do that. It carries the hesitation before a hard sentence, the warmth that creeps in when someone talks about their kids, the accent that tells you where a life was lived, the laugh that means the opposite of the words. Text gives you a person's position. The voice gives you the person. You cannot stay angry at a worldview once you can hear the human being holding it — and that is exactly the thing the internet has made it so easy to forget.

Why anonymous, and why a stranger

The hardest decision was to attach nothing. No profile, no photo, no handle, no follower count, no history that follows you into the next call. I made Mindfuse anonymous because anonymity removes the performance layer — and almost everything online is performance. When there's a profile attached, you say the thing that protects your profile. When there isn't, you can finally say what you actually think. The strangeness is a feature, not a bug. You will be more honest with someone who will never know your name than with most of the people who do. There is no reputation to manage with a voice you'll never hear again. There is only the conversation, which turns out to be the only part that was ever worth keeping.

What surprised me

I assumed Mindfuse would be for lonely people. It is, sometimes, and I'm glad. But that's not who showed up. The people who use it most are not the isolated — they're the curious. The nurse who finishes a night shift and wants to hear what 3 a.m. sounds like in Manila. The retired engineer collecting countries the way other people collect stamps. The teenager in a small town who has decided, quietly, that the town is not going to be the size of her world. They don't open the app because they're short of people. They open it because they're short of difference, and difference is the one thing their feed is engineered to never give them.

The bigger thing

Here is the bet underneath all of it. If two people from completely different countries — who'd never have met, who'd been told by every algorithm that the other side is a caricature — can actually understand each other in a single ten-minute conversation, then that is not a small thing. It scales. Understanding has always scaled one conversation at a time; that's the only way it has ever worked. We tried to skip the conversation and broadcast instead, and we got a more connected, more polarised, lonelier world for the trouble.

So Mindfuse is small on purpose. One person, one other person, one voice each, no audience. That's the whole product. I built it because I think the most radical thing you can do in 2026 is talk to someone who sees the world completely differently — and discover they were a person the entire time.

— Joeri