Work has been full speed ahead, and with the kids back at school and their extracurricular activities, it’s been hard to find a new rhythm. This weekend was the first time in a while that I’ve had the mental energy to be creative again.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media companies are now putting AI into all their products. I use a lot of AI myself, but I find it disturbing to have my personal content, especially family pictures, in the hands of companies that could use my data for whatever they have in mind in the future.
I live far away from my own family, so we’ve had no choice but to be on social media to keep in touch and keep each other updated on what’s happening in our lives. However, I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with having our memories and photos hosted by companies that are ad-driven. I’ve been contemplating leaving for a while now, but I’d still need a way to keep friends and family updated about our lives here.
Social networks are great because they connect people. But because they’re mostly ad-funded, you get lumped in with a lot of other people and served content based on the profile companies build from your interactions with that content. It feels invasive. What I do like is the idea of people sharing and reacting to things.
I want my kids to be able to share their photos so my family back home can keep up with their daily lives too. But I don’t want them signing up to social networks and surrendering their data just to keep in touch with family overseas.
I remember the GeoCities days, the first time I got to build my own “home page”. I was never a capable designer, so most of my sites had tables and marquees. I used to envy my web designer friends, because they designed such rich blogs and websites that they were genuinely fun to visit and read.
Now that there are tools that can help build things that at least look aesthetically acceptable, I’ve been busy building apps for myself, versions of things tailored to how I want to use them. I have so much fun thinking of the next thing to build, sending it to the AI agent and coming back a few hours later to a fully deployed, working site.
So I built my own little social network: a place for my family to share our memories, and to invite the people close to us to come visit and see our latest updates. It’s like a family homepage on social media steroids. I have no desire to have our stories available for web scraping, or whatever else is scraping the internet these days, so most of it is invite only.
I came up with the concept of a Barrio because I’m already thinking about when my kids move out to houses of their own. When they do, I want to be able to expand the family site with more houses.
For the MVP we started with one house, and the house has three spaces. The Front Yard is a public view, where we can share content with anyone passing by. The Living Room is where invited guests can see the more private content the family chooses to share with visitors. It even has “decoration”, a collage of three photos that cycle on the page, selected by the homeowner (me). Lastly, the Kitchen is where we household members can post things that are only for the household.
I also added a live chat that we call the Couch, where people can sit around and chat with whoever else is visiting. Otherwise, visitors can like and reply to the feed in the Living Room.
We’ve been trying it out for a day and I’ve already expanded the concept to an office. The same way a home has three layers, my office has a Shop Window, a Conference Room and a Back Office. Because, you guessed it, the app is event sourced, it was easy to add new events specific to the office. And the concept fits, since a barrio doesn’t just have homes, it has businesses too! Obviously ItsyBIT had to have a presence in the barrio.
I have so many more ideas, but I’ll try to pace myself so we have time to see what actually works for the people using it.
One of my kids is already asking for her own hangout place, which makes sense. Kids want to hang out at home with a little bit of privacy. Homeowners can still peek in, though, for safety.
I love being able to build things tailored to my own needs. Everyone should be building things and owning their own data, especially now that the tools to do it are here.
Come visit the ItsyBIT office in the barrio: https://barrio.itsybit.se/itsybit
