Constructing a social media app by your self is hard

Final 12 months, Elon Musk accomplished his acquisition of Twitter and promptly introduced chaos to the corporate — shedding three-quarters of the workers and upending many lengthy steady (if not at all times profitable) components of the enterprise. So Twitter customers started searching for a method out. Many migrated, even when just for a number of days, to Mastodon, others moved to Instagram or Snap, and lots of people declared Hive Social their new dwelling.

Hive appeared like a cleaner, higher model of Twitter, with a sexy app that includes a well-known interface — solely it creaked underneath the sudden inflow of latest customers. Then, the corporate introduced it could have to shut down its servers for 2 weeks to repair safety points. The challenges Hive confronted have been monumental — as they’d be for any social media firm all of a sudden dealing with so many new customers whereas wrestling with previous safety considerations. However Hive wasn’t an organization of hundreds of engineers. It solely had a handful of workers.

Hive was based by Raluca Pop in 2019. Like one other social media platform founder, Pop was nonetheless in school when she started engaged on the app. She’s confronted a lot of challenges with the fast-growing app within the years since she launched it on Apple’s App Retailer, so for The Vergecast, Ashley Esqueda sat down to speak together with her about creating Hive Social as a single developer, constructing a group, and dealing with the challenges that late 2022 posed.

This episode is the primary in a five-part collection we’re calling Solo Acts. Every episode focuses on somebody going it (largely) alone to create one thing actually cool on the web. Episodes will air for the following 5 Mondays along with our common Wednesday and Friday exhibits.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .