Hi friends,

Thank you for taking the time to try my app Beluga. You are one of the first people to see and try the app, so your feedback is crucial to getting everything right before launch.

What is Beluga?

Beluga is an app designed to publish short pieces of content. You can use Beluga to share your thoughts on a recent movie, a photo of your cat, a link to an interesting news story, or a short funny video.

On the surface, Beluga feels and works like Twitter or any of the other popular social media apps. But, if you looked closely you'll find that we achieve a very similar user experience while giving you the user complete privacy and control over your data.

We don't have servers

First of all, we don't have servers and we don't store any of your data. When you open Beluga for the first time, the app will ask you for credentials to a web server that you control.

That server could be in your house or in the cloud, it's your choice to make and the app will work with whatever you prefer.

You just need to provide the login information and we'll take care of encrypting and storing your server details on your device's keychain. That data never leaves your device.

Once that's done, whenever you create a post we will publish it to your server, directly from your phone. The app will even create a very simple website to display all your recent activity, this website is your Beluga feed.

Now other Beluga users can follow your feed from their app. They just have to visit your website and click on the follow button. This will open the app and allow them to automatically receive new posts when you publish them.

The future will be nice

Allowing our users to host their own content feels like the right way of doing things. Our users don't have to worry about their privacy since they control what they publish and where they publish it. I don't know when or who uses the app and I don't want to know.

The downside of this approach is that it is harder for users to get started but I have a lot of ideas on how to improve the process. I imagine a future where you can get started with just a few clicks without knowing anything about web server configuration.

The Beluga protocol

Beluga was made using established open standards to create and share an open protocol that other apps can use.

Right now I'm focused on the iOS app but another person could build a similar app for Android so we could reach more people.

I will publish documentation on this open and decentralized protocol very soon and don't worry, we are not using blockchain.

That's it for now.

Please give Beluga a try and let me know what you think.

- Gio