abhpro

I've been finding my performance and motivation at my current web developer job has been declining over the years. I've been reading a lot of self help and psychology books lately, and I think that the problem is simply that I don't care about, or believe in, the company I work at. We exist to make money really. I mean we do provide a service, but so much of it is locked behind over priced paywalls, and my job consists of running experiments on users to essentially milk as much money from them as possible. It's like my mind wants to revolt because I don't think we're doing good for the world (at best neutral), and yet my main work in life is to help them.

So I think, what could I build on my own that impassions me? Well, anger is a great motivator. Find a problem that makes you angry, and that can inspire an entire company vision. For me, I truly think social media might lead to some sort of collapse of our society, in some form. Especially now with Horizon on the... horizon.. I'm just genuinely concerned that fuckerberg is going to turn our world into his own circus.

So why not an open source social media platform? The initial ideas from me:

* Create a discord so we can start talking and collaborating * 100% of the code (front and back end) would be hosted online for anyone to contribute to or fork, so full transparency * Eventually, there may be some salaries for whoever ends up maintaining it, but it will be strictly not-for-profit * Ideally completely donation supported with no ads, and the donated money details could be made public, so everyone could see what was in the bank, how long the service could keep live on donations, and some sort of ledger so any withdraws and their purpose were public as well * All features of a modern social media platform should be supported, so video (short and long), pictures, text posts, followers, friends, comments, explore, several different types of feeds. This could actually be a great opportunity to brainstorm how we could incorporate the best features from all the current major players and perhaps make something even better * We could start a kickstarter too!

This is my first post with this idea, so I'm partially just trying to see if it resonates with anyone else and if there's enough people who'd be willing to help with a cause like this. To me, social media is perhaps becoming too ubiquitous and influential to be for profit, and maybe it needs the Wikipedia treatment?

By API, I mean whatever calls that are managing your front-end data. For example, if I had many user inputs that managed closely related data, should I start from a user perspective and build out all the components with empty calls? Or should I define and build out all the calls themselves before even thinking about the components (assuming the spec isn't super strict)? Fwiw I'm assuming a reactive, data-driven front-end. Also assuming the priority is extensibility. Does any of that makes sense lol