Disclaimer: this is a general life/site update and I will be rambling about things so be warned...
I got really sad and overwhelmed with the state of the world and kind of abandoned the redesign project in pursuit of other things, but I kept being pointed back to doing this and I felt a deep deep deep regret for not finishing this project. I never deleted the files or anything, I switched operating systems because Microsoft... and there was like a lot of setting up to get this thing in a state where I could develop again. Working on this felt like an enormous climb when I got to a certain point of it and I realized it was because I went into this with no plan. I guess when I started I just wanted to see how far I could get and then when shit started working I was like whoa lets keep going. Now everything is a little more optimized and bugs I was struggling to fix are gone :)
I'm deeply sorry for leaving yall hanging like this. While I was on a little hiatus from developing this project it left me a lot of time to think and view different social medias from a new lens. I got a lot of ideas from both existing sites and others that I have seen being developed in a response to the all the AI slop dominating our feeds on literally every platform. I also hate AI Slop as I'm sure most do, so I am going to try and mitigate AI users as much as possible (though I don't really know how to do that yet)
Its almost in like an alpha testing state. I'm going to put it up soon as an invite only platform, and to be honest, it will probably stay invite only and new users will have to apply and be reviewed. The old internet is dead and now we need to have small communities of trusted people again.
There is still the problem of hosting. I still don't have an answer for it some ideas tho. But small and invite only should hopefully keep costs low. I'm also going to be starting a patreon for those with some extra cash that want to support can do so. All donations will go directly into the money pit called cloud hosting.