Immersive Communities - A social media platform for content creators (4 years of solo-development)
Hi everyone, I'm Mario, the creator of Immersive Communities. 👋
😃After 4 years of solo-development, I'd like to present, Immersive Communities, a social media platform for collaborative content creators. Blogging platforms like Medium.com have been around for a while, but writers have always been looking for something new.
💖 I've created Immersive Communities as a platform which enables content creators to start their own communities, where they can write about the things they are passionate about with other likeminded people. Each community you create can be monetized with Member Subscriptions and Self-Service Ads, which was implemented using Stripe.
📱 A big feature of Immersive Communities is its PWA-first approach. You can easily install every community, right from the browser on your desktop, mobile phone or tablet. You will then get a branded fullscreen app, with your icon and a splash screen for each community you create. No Apple AppStore or Google PlayStore needed.
📙 You can write 2 types of articles, Interests and Reviews and it gives you a Pinterest-like experience while browsing. This means that at the bottom of each article, you will get recommendations for more articles which was implemented using Recombee recommender service. All articles are searchable thanks to Algolia.
🫶 Each Interest is an article which can be edited by anyone and can be linked with other Interests to for a wiki-like knowledge base. Each member can then write a Review for an Interest, which can only be edited by the person who created the review. This will allow members to easily find all reviews for an interest (a product) in one place.
📺 You can write collaboratively with your members and all articles you write support Markdown out of the box. You can embed media into your articles which is a feature implemented using Embed.ly. The handling of images is done using Cloudinary.com
🌎 You will find that the community is currently localized in 10 languages and this is thanks to Locize.com, an i18next localization service. Thanks, and I hope you find it useful!
I’ve also just launched on Product Hunt so feel free to check it out there as well.
The product looks very gorgeous! Seriously is one of the best design I've came across in the last few months.
Having said that, I think this will be an extremely hard to swallow experience for you. I strongly suggest you to read about lean startup. Please, trust me, go ahead and take a look at some videos on YouTube about that topic.
Good luck with your launching!
Hi Fabri, thanks for the great feedback. I will humbly take your suggestion and read up (and watch) any piece of information that's suggested. Admittedly, I am a pure tech person, with no entrepreneurial experience at all. 😊
Thanks for taking the time to post your feedback, much appreciated!
Wow, this is so impressive! It's amazing that this was a solo effort, especially with the wide variety of features required, from localization to embedding media and so forth.
Love the dark theme of the site, and the Pinterest-like image grids that appear underneath articles. I found the site intuitive to use overall, and would find it incredibly useful if I want to set up some communities in the future. I've just bookmarked it!
Wishing you all the very best with your launch, and if you ever need any other feedback, be sure to let me know! :D
Hi silvi, thanks for the great feedback. As I said earlier, it will require me to write a whole article on how and why I decided to build this thing in the first place. Many things done on the backend are not visible unless you know they are there.
But if you just take one of the most obvious features, its the ability to install each community as a stand alone PWA app. The PWA installation is based on the subdomain, so each community, gets its own branded app, with its own icon and splash screen.
This separation is done based on the subdomain, but the manifest.js specification for the PWA apps, does not work on subdomains, but rather it applies to the whole domain.
So, in order to achieve this, I had to use AWS Lambda@Edge functions. Using these functions on CloudFront, I detected when the manifest.js file is being called by the client. Then I generated the file dynamically and populated its fields, like app name and icon url with values based on the subdomain.
In other words, I get these values from the database based on which subdomain, that is, which community the user is currently browsing.
There are many such tricks I had to employ to get the thing working as I envisioned, but the full rundown will have to wait for later.
Hi Mario,
It's incredibly impressive that each community can be installed as a PWA app also, and using Lambda@Edge functions sounds like a great way to achieve that. It sounds like there were lots of interesting technical challenges to overcome here.
I'd definitely love to read the full article on the various technical aspects regarding the implementation and so forth. Plus, if you share the article on Hacker News, it would lead to some considerable traffic, since we love those types of articles there. And of course, that would boost signups too! It's a great marketing strategy that I'd recommend trying out, can lead to some fantastic results.
Hi silvi. Hacker News is definitely a place where I intend to post my article as well, I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.
In any case, thanks for the invitation!
Wow, what a herculean effort! 💪🏻 It looks really interesting. What's your plan for getting your first users?
Thanks Brandon. Well, I already have a couple of users (completely non-tech) but I'm mostly helping them in Private Messages to post something. 😆
Just so you know, it took me from 1st of February 2018 till 25th of April 2022 to finish this, while working a fulltime job. I'm going to write an article on Medium.com, detailing everything I did in the last 4 years. That's also going to take some time.
As for getting some traffic, its all about content and I will try to get people to write articles which should drive organic traffic from Google. Then I can monetize with Adsense and Amazon Associates, which should start paying for the server cost.
Once I have the people coming regularly to the website, then my Stripe payments should kick in and people should start using those.