Beluga publishes your posts to a JSON/RSS feed and a simple static site on the open Web. Publish your "tweet-like" content to your preferred S3-compatible service directly from your phone.
Hi friends.
Beluga is a reaction to all the Twitter craziness. I've been thinking about this idea for a long time and finally decided to build the app a few months back.
The idea is straightforward. Can we build a Twitter-like experience without central servers or a single point of failure? RSS was my point of reference, and that's why Beluga is essentially a feed reader/writer.
When you publish a post, Beluga will create a beluga.json and upload it to your S3-compatible server. Other users can follow you and get updates by fetching that file. The beluga.json file is JSON Feed compatible to maximize interoperability. The app also publishes a beluga.xml which is a standard RSS feed. Users can follow your Beluga feed from the app or from their favorite RSS reader.
To make the app even more accessible, a static mini-site is generated and published to your S3-compatible online storage.
Here's the mini-site of my feed: https://beluga.gcollazo.com
Please give the app a try. Setting up an S3 bucket might be difficult, so feel free to reach out to me, and I will help you support @ beluga.social.
Upcoming features:
- Easy publish without setting your own S3 bucket
- Read-only mode
- Multiple device sync
- Support for more S3 compatible providers
- Support for GitHub pages
- Mastodon interoperability
@gcollazo curious why you chose JSON Feed rather than ActivityPub? Mastodon could really use a slick iOS client and Beluga looks like a great start!
Also, do you participate in the Indieweb community?
@chrismessina I want to enable as many clients as possible for the feed. The app currently produces JSON/RSS feeds and a website. I will soon add basic compatibility to allow Mastodon users to follow Beluga feeds from their favorite servers/apps.
My main issue with ActivityPub is that it requires "expert" hosting. A Mastodon server is a complex and hard-to-scale collection of services, including a database. The approach I went with uses "dumb storage" in the form of S3 buckets, shared web hosting via SFTP during the beta process, and very soon, Github Pages and more.
Hosting and scaling a file on the web is a lot simpler, but it has many limitations, some of which can be solved with optional central servers, a model very common in the podcasting world.
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