More than 20 years ago, I built this site called CampusFish, which was kind of a blog/photo site/community thing. Maybe it was a little like LiveJournal, but I also remember being influenced by some other sites. I couldn't tell you where the name came from, other than I was targeting college kids as an audience. I also made the choice to charge money for it. I think it was like $15 a year or something. A small number of people bought in, and it was a nice little community.
TogetherLoop is not really novel at all, as it's social media the way it used to be. Just a plain old feed of people that you're friends with, newest post first and totally chronological. You can post text, photos and video, and send private messages (friends only). I'm not inventing a new format, because at its core, it seems to work pretty well. Everything new in recent years works similarly, only with algorithms, ephemeral photo/video, and sometimes you swipe instead of scroll. But it's all pretty much the same, just private and not enshittified.
My intent, if it were to get large enough, is to charge money for it, because nothing is really for free. People might be content to give away their attention elsewhere, but that's not what I'm after. I don't care about engagement, I just care about connection. The worst case scenario is that it's a hobby that me and like four other people use to keep in touch. The medium case is that it becomes a small lifestyle business. That's really all I want for it. It doesn't have to be gigantic.
Today I worked through a backlog of polish issues. Little tweaks and visual things that were kinda sloppy looking. Most people won't notice, but I do. It brings me joy to see the tweaks. I'm really happy with the way this thing came together, and as fast as it did. And to be clear, using an AI agent made it faster to "type" code, but the AI didn't make decisions. If left to its own devices, it would have made something that was hard to maintain, had crappy performance and definitely wouldn't scale. You couldn't "vibe code" it into existence and get to the same place.
Perhaps now I should try and button up some of the quirks in MLocker...
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