After weeks of building, testing, breaking things, fixing them, breaking them again, fighting APIs, fighting free-tier limitations, and occasionally questioning why I started this project in the first place…
Crowdwide started as an idea for a social platform where communities could actually grow and have their own space.
The first stable version includes the core social features I wanted Crowdwide to have, along with a bunch of things that I didn't even plan when I started.
Posts, articles, polls, communities, profiles, chat, media, reactions, bookmarks, notifications, moderation tools, and much more are now part of the platform.
So instead of stopping there, I started experimenting with some more unusual ideas.
Communities can be represented on a map, with the size of their presence growing as the community grows.
The idea is to make communities feel like they're actually part of a larger world instead of just existing as another page in a database.
Communities can create quests or challenges for their members and announce a winner.
I originally got the idea after seeing a quest/challenge concept on DEV and thought:
Inspired by things like Spotify's personal recap, Crowdwide now has a recap section that can show things about your activity and interests on the platform.
I think this could be especially useful for community announcements, collaborative articles, projects, and other shared content.
While working on the bigger ideas, I also realized there were a bunch of things I simply couldn't leave out.
GIF support Media sharing in chats Message search Group chat details Community moderation Polls Articles Drafts Scheduled publishing Hashtags Mentions Quote posts Replies Reactions Bookmarks Private/public communities Community roles and moderators Post approval Pinned posts Community guidelines Profiles Followers/following Saved posts Two-factor authentication Recovery codes Password reset Email verification And a LOT more
Sometimes an API key would get revoked or a service would stop responding, and I'd sit there debugging perfectly fine code.
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why the exact same thing works locally but doesn't behave properly in production.
I'll keep working on it and hopefully get it working properly in a future update.
The platform is stable enough to call this the first version, but I'll continue improving the UI over time.
Better layouts Better spacing Small design improvements Better mobile experience Improved interactions More polished components And random little things that I suddenly decide look ugly. 😂