I made a big, long, technical post a short time back about building a 1-person “social network” app. This is a short post explaining what it is without all the technical details.
A short time ago I made a 1-person, Twitter-like social networking app. Weird? Well, maybe. But I’ve found it really useful.
I like to write. I find it very helpful to get my thoughts into words. And I suppose over my many years of “micro-blogging” my brain has wired itself to sometimes “think” in “Tweets”. I’m not proud of this. But I think it is true.
But sometimes you want to get the thought out without necessarily sharing it with the world.
This is where YouSky comes in.
It’s a box that you can type plain text into (or Markdown works, if that’s your thing) and post to a timeline. That’s kinda it. You get the hit of pressing “Post”, with none of the drawbacks of your thought becoming public.
You can search your posts. You can use “hashtags” to label posts with topics. And you can edit and delete posts.
Perhaps you could call it “Micro journaling”.
It’s TOTALLY private. The data is stored in your web browser. Which might be a weird – but very cool – new thing for some people because:
- You don’t need to sign up – just start using it!
- There is no server and I don’t collect any data about you at all.
- It’s super fast because all your posts are just there.
- You don’t need to install an app – though if you save the app to your home screen it will look and work like one.
There are some downsides though:
- Data can’t sync between devices.
- You can potentially lose your data (though I have provided the ability to download the data and save it).
- It’s text-only – no photos, no videos.
I, personally, think the benefits far outweigh the costs for this little app.
I’ve been regularly using this. To remember things. To “forget” things (because writing things down gets them out of your head). To shout into the void.
I’ve found it very useful. And very simple.
It’s not the most polished app. I’m not a designer. But it works well. It’s 100% private. It’s 100% free. And you can get started right at yousky.veryuseful.app