Hey everyone,
Sorry for the silence. I've been heads-down building something and lost track of how long it had been since I posted here. This is me catching up.
What I've Been Working On
Some of you know me from SylvaCrypt, my encrypted messaging project over at github.com/Forestritium/SylvaCrypt. That's still going. But alongside it, I've been quietly working on something different. a social platform called Sylvium.
The idea started simply enough. I wanted a place to post things that wasn't optimised to make me angry, wasn't selling my attention to advertisers, and didn't bury longer content under an endless feed of short videos. I couldn't find one I liked, so I started building one.
Sylvium is still early. It's not open source yet. I'm working toward that once it's stable enough to document properly. But it's at a point where it works, and I'd rather get real feedback now than build in isolation for another few months.
What It Has Right Now
The basics are there. blog posts, threads, short-form video, media posts, polls. DMs with voice notes and GIFs. Stories. Nested comments with sorting. Hashtag pages you can follow. A recommendation feed in Reels. Scheduled posts. A creator analytics dashboard. Reposts and quote posts. Blocks. A moderation portal. Push notifications. Internationalisation. It's installable as a PWA.
That's the honest summary. It's not everything. there's a lot still missing.
What It Doesn't Have Yet
I'd rather be upfront about this than have you discover it yourself:
No live streaming
Stories expire after 24 hours with no way to save or highlight them yet
Watch duration isn't tracked, so the recommendation engine only knows you watched something, not for how long
Link click-through isn't measured in analytics
Collaborative posts aren't supported
DMs are not end-to-end encrypted yet: This is something I'm planning to work on after the core features are complete. Messages are stored on the server. Please keep that in mind for now
Not open source yet because that's planned once it's more stable
What I Actually Need From You
Try it. That's it.
Use it for a bit and tell me what you think, what's missing, what feels off, what you'd want that isn't there. If you have ideas for completely different projects you think I should work on, I'd love to hear those too.
The support ticket system inside the app is the easiest way to reach me, or just drop a comment here.
Everything gets read.
Aarav | A-Solo-Engineer
Sylvium: [https://sylvium.vercel.app/]