This first post is entirely informational - Only visible to the few of you users who have logins, I removed the apply button from homepage
Front page of the website is my blog, behind that is a fully functioning social media platform focused on encouraging conversations between friends.
Soon this will be where my food and travel blog will live. But for now I am going to use it to give a brief explanation of the state of the website and what's going on here.
If you are reading this it's because I have sent you a link to join the very early development group of this project. Most of you have known various parts of this project that I've been working on for a very long time but not how they are all going to come together.
Since the name of the project is genesis I find it appropriate to call this first group of friends Chapter 01 of genesis. There will not be any new chapters until the site feels stable and secure and I am confident I can protect everyone's data. I will not go live with the site until then.
Let me tell you why I started this project
It has been very clear to me lately how much damage social media and the constant flow of information are doing to my brain. For some reason I've placed this internal burden on myself that I need to be active online so that if someone from my life needs to talk they will have a place to contact me. I don't have any particularly good reason for not sharing more of the art I make and more of my thoughts.
However, upon further reflection I realized how rarely I post about genuine and important things online. It has never felt like the appropriate of any social media I have had and it took me a while to figure out why.
I want people to be able to choose specifically when they want to read my thoughts and see what I'm up to rather than having everything I do forced into their feed alongside 10 targeted ads. I don't want algorithms, I want somewhere that friends can go to see what I'm up to without being bombarded by noise and external pressures.
So here we are. I have created two parts of this website. The homepage is my blog - this will be public eventually and will have food, travel, and likely art content as well. I intend to do my best to keep this part fairly anonymous - ambiguous at very least, I will use the name joel with no surname.
Upon logging into the website however there is an entire social media platform. There I will have a personal account that I will use to post more personal things. There will be plenty of settings for privacy so that your content can be visible only to certain people etc. You will have control over who can see the photos, notes, messages, etc. that you upload.
My eventual goal is to be able to move away from all social media (I only have one left) and be able to post all of my content between my blog and my personal account on the social media website. This way I can get everything out of my brain and recorded somewhere without having to be bombarded by ads ever.
This way I can still produce public content but also create a place where I can be more vulnerable and genuine that my friends can also interact with me and each other if they choose to.
So for now, I'm going to continue developing the rest of the features of the website. If you came around for chapter 01 and created an account thanks! I know there's a lot of work to be done but there are already some cool functions of the site and I hope you can find ways to utilize them in a helpful way. At very least you have helped me learn how to manage multiple users with various privileges etc. and that is very helpful for testing purposes! No pressure.
If you have any questions about the site or some weird bug I can fix for you etc. just shoot me a message via whatever form you got the invite. You all have various versions of my contact information. If you don't have one of my personal contacts you are always welcome to email admin@genesis.blog as that will always go to me.
Let me know if there is anything I can do to make this more usable.
I'm most excited about the notes section, I think a private note shared with only friends will be a neat way to share. We shall see
As for all the photos you are seeing (and will continue to see)
I will be creating all of the visual assets for the website. I have recently found a love for digital art. So I've been making a ton of art using AI and then modifying it in photoshop to create some really neat images so I will be producing a lot of art to post.
I will likely find some way to share timelapse videos of me creating some of the artwork either on the website or the blog. But I'm about to start traveling again so I will be putting a big focus on the blogging portion and am also working on developing a sushi menu for my upcoming cooking classes so there's no real timeline here.
