Thread by @umurbasar, . @matrushka , @ldanielswakman and I have been working on http://pheme.app for [...]

. @matrushka , @ldanielswakman and I have been working on http://pheme.app for almost 3 years now. Although I’ve always enjoyed building it, after our recent narrative change, I’ve started to truly enjoy using it.

Here goes my first ever tweet thread.

1/15

Since the very beginning our goal has been sustainability. We wanted to build a platform which can survive without any sponsorship or monetization strategy so that we would avoid the fate of Vine and FFFFOUND! by all means.

2/15

For those who don’t remember, these two were content sharing platforms which shut down at some point and flushed all user content they had along. Unfortunately, many content sharing platforms out there today operate under this risk.

3/15

At the time of building @pheme_ we were (and still are) especially worried about @Medium. As fans of it, we thought they might have to pull the plug soon because they don’t have any ad revenue. So initially we built the narrative of Pheme around self-publishing.

4/15

Instead of building a platform depending on the “cloud” and putting ourselves under any financial burden, we used two brilliant peer-to-peer technologies, #IPFS & #Ethereum, to store & serve all content from our own homes, and to minimize our costs.

5/15

All content you see on http://pheme.app today is stored and served in an equipment we have in our homes (mine is this raspberry pi). Since the back-end is open sourced, anybody can store a copy of Pheme content and ensure its survival in years to come.

6/15

Although we achieved our goal of sustainably, soon we realized our mistake with the narrative of becoming a self-publishing platform. In time we realized that none of us like to write articles, nor know anyone who does. So the platform stayed idle for quite sometime.

7/15

Just recently, we added support to post images, which helped us find a better narrative for the platform. I can’t say this is going to be the final one, but nowadays I find myself thinking and planning my next post on @pheme_ quite often, which is a great sign.

8/15

This new narrative is built around storing long-term memories. By long-term memories, we mean the stories and moments we value the most and want to have a copy of it for many years to come.

9/15

This narrative works perfectly for me, since I already have a device at my home holding a copy of content shared on http://pheme.app . It is like having an online external hard disk.

10/15

Now my mission is to figure out how to give other people the same opportunity to store these valuable moments and enjoy using Pheme as much as I do. My tentative 3 step action plan is as follows;

11/15

1. Make it easy for people to install and run an instance of Pheme.

From publishing how-to guides to shipping pre-configured Raspberry Pi’s there are many opportunities here. I believe the coolest would be a collaboration with
@DAppNode

12/15

2. Selective content pinning

At the moment, Pheme’s pinning service pins all content shared on http://pheme.app . We need to change this and allow people to pin only the memories they want to their external hard disks to save on storage space.

13/15

3. Open sourcing the front-end

Although our back-end is open sourced, our front-end is not. In time, I want to open source it so that people can fork our interface and preserve their memories however they want.

14/15

If you made your way down here, thanks for taking the time to read this thread. Please follow @pheme_ for updates, and check http://pheme.app out. Would be forever grateful if you share any feedback, idea or opinion with me.

15/15

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