space whY presents Inkling.
Visit the App!
Inkling is a social media app created with the user in mind first to share ideas, art, links... etc. This site uses GraphQL, Node.js, Express.JS. MongoDB, Mongoose ODM, Queries/Mutations, Heroku, and Cloudinary/Axios as its technologies.
Why did we build this site? Our first motivation was simple, we wanted to target an opening in the market that we think could appear with Twitter's current state. When talking about it we found that all the developers have been a part of social media since its infancy. We discussed what we missed and what we enjoyed as we have seen social media grow. We missed the days of MySpace and early Facebook when it was so exciting to visit friends' profiles, we wanted to bring that joy back but including modern successes of the current social media state. Inkling is not just a cute way to have an ocean squid theme but is also known as a thought. A vast ocean of ideas is to be posted. With our ideas of how we want the site to run, we wanted the user to enjoy that experience without feeling like only corporate accounts with teams of people posting were the only way to be seen as interesting on the website.
Inkling will have a pretty quick feeling of Twitter with a feed of posts from all that you follow, but what users will find is that profiles are handled differently. In later features, we will be adding the ability for users to pick a song to play when someone visits their profile among other things to help give a better customized feel to every profile one visits. With those old-school ideas implemented, we wanted to also add some modern ideas. BeReal is an app that has success on scarcity, you must post to see other posts and you can only post once a day. Our spin on this concept is that all posts only last 7 days and then are deleted from user view, the only way to view the feed is to post.
What is the point of having someone post so they can view and have posts deleted in 7 days? Not only does this encourage the user to check in at least daily but encourages users to post which adds to the content to be seen. Another conscious thought that we had is that we did not want to create an app that prays on addiction. Though we do want to see consistent traffic, we don't want some endlessly scrolling, deleting posts not only makes things exclusive but sets a limit on how far/long someone can be on the website.
How can you use Inkling? Inkling is at its bare bones stage, as our mentioned features will be added at a later date, our deployed links below are how you can make a profile and start posting.
The Dev team. Andy - https://github.com/abilodeau21 Charlie - https://github.com/charliec1665 Elijah - https://github.com/ejackson1228 Zaiden - https://github.com/zasen01