Jul 10, 2026, 12:18 AMI was frustrated by the number of businesses that only have an Instagram presence. However, that is where most people are and therefore the place where it is worth putting effort into.
My plan is to make an easy to host site that is optimized for organizations and will natively surface posts through ActivityPub, RSS, ATProto and a simple website and also have easy integration with the walled gardens. Namely Instagram but I might also integrate with X or Facebook.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:19 AMBy "optimized for organizations" I mean that there is a disconnect between users and organizations so multiple users can post for a given organization and that I'm not going to bother with following or a home feed or anything of the sort. Replies will have an inbox an the ability to reply to them but most of the inteaction through that account will only go one way.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:19 AMThe main design decisions I have made on it and my reasoning are:
RPCs for communicating with the backend. This may be bias from the longest stint of my career being at Google but I do really like how the whole API surface can be catalogued in one place and that it is theoretically possible for someone to take those and know exactly what they need to implement to make a new backend.
Backend is written in Rust. This is really just to learn a new language and it's been pretty fun to use.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:20 AMPublic frontend will be a static HTML site. Posts will be made in markdown and users can choose to add custom CSS and then Hotch will convert the markdown into HTML and pop that into a directory that can be served with an extremely simple server.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:20 AMI'm still wondering whether an how to serve comments that come in through ActivityPub or ATProto. My current thought is an iframe which can be left unloaded when traffic is high but my entire career has been writing backends that are as far from UIs as possible so I will need to ask for help with that decision when I get to it.
Jul 10, 2026, 12:33 AMMy plan for the first instance when I finally finish it is to try to make a server for all of the local bike clubs that only announce their rides on Instagram.