Personal project

The motivation to work on personal projects started during my university years. I’ve had so many different ideas ever since, and implemented a few of them too. But there’s one in particular that stuck with me. And it all started when Google Reader was released.

During a period known as Web 2.0, Google Reader was an RSS aggregator, just like many similar apps available at the time, that helped you manage the list of blogs you were following. But it had a very distinctive feature that got really popular amongst readers that helped create a community around it. Basically, you could share any item from your RSS feed, which then got instantly added to a public “Shared Items”, which, of course, had its own RSS feed as well. This allowed you to follow users inside Google Reader to have a glimpse of what that user was reading and recommending.

This feature along helped meet new internet people that I’m still following online until today, and it was the first time I had contact with a concept that I’m now calling “digital curatortorship”. These users were following blogs that interested them and in the meantime sharing what they thought was interesting, picking out the best content from a stream of posts and sharing it to others. You might not have the same level of interest in the topics the user you’re following has, but you might be interested just enough to want to read the best articles about it. This is the cornerstone of the tool I’m building.

It took years (over a decade if I’m being honest) before I had a clear vision of the product I wanted to create. The idea went from being a mobile app, to a social network, and a lot of approaches in between. For a while, I had only a vague feeling of what I wanted to achieve and how to achieve it; I only understood the vibe I was looking for. Alongside there were also my ideals of living in a more equal society, where trusted information can be found more easily, and the professionals that would work to make sure this information gets shared would be fairly compensated.

After a while, I realized that the challenges that I had in mind were pretty similar to what journalists around the world have been facing. From newsrooms layoffs to news deserts, the struggles these professionals are facing have a direct correlation to the state of the world currently, with society not being able to discern what’s real from what’s fake from the lack of reputable sources but also low media literacy. I don’t think a single initiative can fix this process, but I certainly hope this project will help struggling journalists find new sources of income.

But how will it work? The idea is to build a web application that users (journalists, curators, etc.) can sign up and create their own newsletters, through a rich editor. The app will help them create and distribute content through email and other means (RSS and social networks, for example), while also providing support if they want to start charging for the work they’ve been doing. At a glance, this is just another newsletter builder, such as Substack, but there are some specific features I want to implement that will make it more geared towards curation and making sure professionals can easily capture and share worthwhile content from around the internet.

In an increasingly polluted digital world, where websites are being created with only SEO in mind, where good and human-created content is ever more scarce, I believe that being able to filter through that noise will become more and more valuable. Being able to trust sources and helping others discover what’s really important are the main goals of this project. No algorithms, no AI, only humans helping other humans by surfacing their creations and connecting with others.