Howdy Dev.to community! This is my first post here, and I wanted to share a bit of a retrospective on a project I have been building as a solo dev :)
For the past several months, I have been hard at work building a new social media platform backed by research and features I always wished existed. Since I hit what feels like a milestone for me, I wanted to share a bit about the journey and the lessons I've learned along the way.
The initial thing I was trying to solve: I'm a millennial who grew up using the internet through community spaces and learning tech through platforms that encouraged creative expression and building. I spun up phpbb forums, Angelfire sites, registered them to a .tk domain (anyone else? lol), and spent most of my youth experimenting with the tools of creation. I wanted to take my fond memories of those early platforms and translate that into my own vision for 2025. Since I am also a massive advocate for virtual community organization, I wanted to develop a framework that connects users in ways I always wished existed. I have done a lot of deep dive research and execution following those two goals, and here's what I have come up with:
HomePageAgain.com
HomePageAgain is the platform I always wished existed. It has research-informed architecture for participatory community spaces: communities organize through genealogy (ThreadRings) instead of algorithms, users customize themselves across three levels (visual to code), and everything is designed for actual community health rather than engagement metrics. It is what happens when you take your nostalgia seriously, study the research, and build something intentional.
As a solo developer on this project, I have learned lessons that caused me to rethink how I frame things. Most of them come down to the tension between how I understand a feature as the engineer and how new users understand that same feature with various levels of technical comfort. I always treat someone’s confusion as serious feedback, because I operate under the belief that most things should be intuitive.
Here are the main things I have come up against:
DID key pairs for login. One of my first decisions was that it would be really cool to have all logins happen via secure keypair. It was cool, secure, techy, and something I had never implemented before. I learned almost immediately that this was not going to fly with basically anyone who is not deeply into tech. People did not understand they needed to save their keypair, they got locked out of accounts, and one user even said "what the hell is this" while trying to log in. I took it in stride and pivoted to offering optional magic link email logins, optional password logins, or a 12 word recovery seed phrase. That seems to have eased concerns, and it was my first real reminder to build for users and not purely for myself.
ThreadRings were my greatest technical innovation, but the explanation was not accessible. The ThreadRing concept is my baby. It is the culmination of my research into virtual community organization, and it is a federated protocol I designed as the backbone for communities on HomePageAgain. The first time I explained it out loud, it became obvious that I needed to refine the messaging to make it more approachable. This is still a work in progress.
First time user experience. I continue to iterate on how to make someone’s first minute on the site feel good. My goal is that users can view posts and profiles without a signup gate and then naturally want to create an account. I also had to accept that while I wanted this to be a desktop first experience, I have to support a positive mobile experience too. Most people in 2025 will click through on their phone.
Beta bugs never end. It is a blessing to have so many people using the site now and constantly finding little bugs and visual issues I missed during development. As a solo dev, it is a never ending task to sort out priority. My general approach is to fix anything that breaks intended functionality, then tackle user nitpicks, then handle the small things I know about that others have not found yet. It is actually fun to play product manager for myself.
Building three separate ways to create and customize profiles has been the hardest technical challenge. Managing three different streams of CSS, allowing users to safely construct their own pages, and adding data bound components tied to profile content has easily consumed the most time. Most people are still intimidated by this feature, but it remains a priority for me to keep making it more accessible.
Community governance is a lot for one person. Every fine detail requires thought. How do I handle NSFW posts. How do I ensure fairness and objectivity in my admin level decisions. There is always some new question, and it really does add up. It is worth it though.
There are definitely things I have forgotten to mention, and many more topics I will encounter as the beta continues. Overall, I would not trade this experience for anything. It is a dream to build the thing I always wanted, and it is even more amazing to see people who are not me actually using it.
I appreciate you for reading this far. Happy to answer any questions you have!
And also, the site is live so if it resonates with you, I'd love to have you check it out! https://homepageagain.com
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