wrblr
Why make a social media app in 2023. Why make anything? Is it to SHIP, scratch an itch, give the people something, prove someone wrong, make money? I don’t know but this is either the best cop out ever or something much deeper.
I started thinking about what this app would not be. No ads! No discovery! Wow you can save photos!
When you define yourself by what you’re not maybe it just ends up being derivative by default. I read somewhere that you shouldn’t approach new projects with this perspective but can’t remember where.
Do people use social media because they like it? Why would you make something people like? You should make something that can grow.
Maybe it is too derivate. Maybe the only way to approach social media is to think about growth first (I do enjoy these tweets). When you’re a developer making small things it’s tempting to think that you’re not going to succumb to that software engineer tunnel vision. Forever stuck in the editor.
That marketer who can come up with 50 push notifications to sell chairs a day is just built different. If I think that and a few other things are wrong how would I ever grow something on the internet quickly?
It’s not something entirely new, it’s just the old thing with the parts you don’t like taken out! Maybe this still works, maybe if I keep adding to it while not making it worse it works. But what is working? It’s hard not to think that social media is this zero-sum game where you either have the whole network or none.
Watching Threads “lose” to Twitter (or X) feels silly when you consider the amount of Threads-only users who are using what is basically the same app. They find it accessible because it’s packaged just a bit differently. I don’t think Tumblr got everyone, but they definitly got enough and were spreading some good taste and ideas.
Maybe that’s what this is on a smaller scale. A social media app in a small developer package. It’s still accessible, isn’t overwhelming, and (hopefully) looks good. Maybe it gets one of your friends to share a few photos you would never have gotten to seen without it.