It's Like Tweeting, But You Can't Use the Letter E
Mouse Reeve, whose day job is software engineering and development at Internet Archive, created the social network's instance oulipo.social with one big rule: No one is allowed to use the letter "e," or "any variant of it, that is found in Latin script."
Reeve told me she was inspired by the novel "A Void" by Georges Pereca. This lipogrammatic book uses every letter in the alphabet but that one accused symbol. It follows the French literary philosophy of Oulipo, a constrained form of writing that combines mathematics and literature.
The banning of this letter is one of Oulipo's most famous constraints: "It limits writing without making it too hard," Reeve told me. "You can still sound natural and say what you want to say, though you may think on it a bit in a way that you wouldn't without constraints." The limitation pushes one to think harder and more creatively about each word chosen, she said.
She wasn't expecting oulipo.social to get popular—this started as a way to test her skills at Ruby on Rails and sharpen some operation systems abilities—but the instance has amassed more than one hundred accounts in the six days it's been running.
