About the 50PlusTribe Project

50Plus Tribe is a private, members-only community for ISTA graduates over 50: a place to keep the spirit of the trainings alive between them, and to stay connected with the people we met there.

Why we built it

An ISTA training creates something rare: a container of trust, openness and presence in which deep connection happens quickly. When the training ends, the container ends with it. 50Plus Tribe is our attempt to recreate that experience online, as nearly as possible, for graduates over 50.

What you’ll find here

• Pods. Small groups of 5 to 7 members, sorted at random for each round, with their own group chat and meetings, much like the pods at a training.
• Profiles you control. Three levels (Public, Casual and Intimate), so you choose who sees what, in the spirit of the RBDSMT check-in.
• Messages. Private conversations, including voice messages.
• Posts. A shared space for reflections, questions, events and news.
• A registry of graduates. Find members who live near you, or in a city you are visiting.

Our principles

• Private. Nothing on the site is visible to people who aren’t members.
• Not commercial. There are no ads, and your information is never sold.
• Built for connection, not attention. No endless scrolling, and no algorithms steering you into echo chambers.
• Consent first. You decide, one member at a time, how much of your profile each person sees.

Who runs it

50Plus Tribe is built and run by volunteers from the ISTA community. At this time there is no budget, and no one is paid. As the community grows, and the web site proves to be useful, donations will be asked for to pay for the cost of hosting our Linode machine.

How it evolved

The idea grew out of the WhatsApp group “Connecting with ISTA 50+ grads and discussion of website and other methods of connection.”

At first, the site was meant to be a simple registry: a way for graduates over 50 to find one another, whether to reconnect with an old friend or to make a new connection anywhere in the world. From the start, members could search for profiles by latitude and longitude or by US zip code. As profiles grew more detailed, the search expanded to include more criteria from members’ profiles.

The profile itself then evolved into three access levels, Public, Casual and Intimate, so that members control who sees what. The Intimate level of your profile is like your half of the ISTA RBDSMT conversation.

Messaging was not part of the original plan, but the site now has a full messaging system that supports text, voice messages, photos and videos. On a phone or tablet, you can take a photo or record a video and send it straight to another member. You can also reply to a specific earlier message and react to messages with emojis.

Next came Pods, modeled as closely as possible on the ISTA pod experience. A pod is a private conversation space shared by a group of five to seven members. Any message you type or voice message you send is visible immediately to all members of the pod.

Finally, the Community Forum lets members share reflections, questions, events and news in a common space, fostering a sense of community and connection. Our own posting tools make it easy to add tags and categories to a post and to edit it afterward.

Questions?

Many are answered in the FAQ. For anything else, write to the administrators.