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Can Amino Be Saved Before It's Too Late?







Posted on August 29, 2022






Can Amino Be Saved Before It's Too Late?


Alright here we go.


A first blog in what…four years. It feels insanely jarring to be writing a post on a platform that I left such a long time ago after witnessing the neglect that was going on. But my shock aside, let’s get into why I am writing this post in the first place. You probably have read the title of this post by now and so I will give you the answer you came here for. The short answer is no. Amino is already in such a state to where it is too late to save. Its original developers, Narvii, abandoned the platform and MediaLab stepped in to acquire it. If you do not know who or what MediaLab is, they are a multi-billion-dollar corporation that controls a lot of major social networking and information outlets. They are most well-known for platforms such as Kik and Imgur. And in recent years they acquired Amino from Narvii after Narvii promptly jumped ship and left their app for dead more or less. Why is MediaLab acquiring Amino a problem?




Well, the answer is that it’s not necessarily the acquisition that is the central issue.


The problem is that Amino was already dying well before MediaLab had acquired the platform. MediaLab’s acquisition just exacerbated the existing issues because, as with any giant techno-corporate company, money is always going to be the main goal. Narvii had already severely damaged their own app in the years following 2017 because of wanting to maximize profit and eventually ended up not only destroying the unique user experience that Amino used to offer, but also wrecked their support staff system on top of it all. Bots, scammers, and more started becoming more and more problematic as time went on, but any complaints to the developers at Narvii fell on deaf ears. Sometime before the acquisition by MediaLab, the CEO of the Amino App, Benjamin Anderson, walked away from the platform and Amino was rendered an orphan. The greed combined with the general apathy for the future of the app has led us to where we are now. A hyper-corporate disaster that is nothing, but a shell stuffed with advertisements, malicious bots, unnecessary features, terrible interfacing, and many other nightmares. There is basically nothing left.


So why am I writing this post?


Well, I am writing it because, despite the fall of Amino, I want to try and build a platform in its ruin. Even though Amino has been treated like dog shit over the years and abandoned to die on its own, I genuinely miss what Amino was during its golden age. It was simple, elegant, and free. There were no ads, antagonistic ranking systems, useless overlays, etc. back then. It was easy to get around and see things. Communities were run far more responsibly, and administration teams had a better set of tools. Now Amino is basically the laughing stock of social media. It has committed every single sin that other social media platforms have, plus some. The state that Amino was left in unironically makes Discord, Twitter, and Reddit look like angels in comparison. And that’s saying a lot since those three platforms that I listed are getting worse and worse by the day. And in general the sociL media market has only been devolving. TikTok is a prime example in this case.


The solution to replacing Amino is either to rebuild it from the ground up or mod the application to work with custom clients.


I will say this once, and once only: Custom clients are going to be much more restrictive and difficult than rebuilding the experience from the ground up. It also means that if Amino itself eventually gets shut down someday, those custom clients become completely useless. For this reason, I am very much for just rebuilding the entire platform from the ground up, but with freedom and security in mind. One of the biggest issues currently in social media development is that everything is centralized and monetized. Ever wonder why you never have to pay to use Instagram, YouTube, and the like? That’s because YOU are the payment. Your data, content, advertisement viewing rate, etc. are all generating cash for these corporations. A lot of people do NOT understand this, and they need to. While you might not care about what happens to your data (classic “Well I have nothing to hide” sentiment), malicious parties are more than happy to do jack all with your data. Eventually this leads to tracking, targeted ads, data trading, social engineering, etc.




In rebuilding Amino, I envision a decentralized network that is free of monetization and advertisements.


How is it run or supported? The install base (us) will keep it running with our own efforts. The new platform that I have in mind would run entirely off of self-hosted connection points that would interconnect to build a federated network of sorts that sit under an umbrella. Every single user would have their own profile that would more or less be their very own website. I know that many people don’t have time to build websites or are too intimidated by the task which is why I am building a profile interface framework from SCRATCH that can easily be copy and pasted to generate a brand-new user profile that mimics classic Amino. With profile generation handled, blogging and chatting could be with essential HTML and IRC clients and web embeds. Amino back in the day was basically WordPress + Chatzy more or less. It was a place where people could access a news feed, a forum, and instant messaging chat rooms. These are the primary components that made Amino what it was. As time went on, Narvii started to add more and more useless bullshit that eventually detracted from what the app was about. It used to be a place where people could manage their creations AND interact with others. This allowed for things like video game tournaments, anime drawing contests, blogging series, interactive fanfiction, etc. This is why I say that Amino Classic was something of its own kind. No other platform or application had actually attempted to do what early Amino was doing. And so now, seven years later, as an adult, I want to revive that experience that I had when I was a teenager. It helped me find friends, let me hone my creativity, and even encouraged me on the path to my current profession.




So, to get this platform rebuilding started I have decided to start building from the outside towards the inside.


This means users first, overhead second. I want to build a network that has a greater focus on the individuals who make up the community rather than the community framework itself. Profiles will be developed which will all serve as their own sub-domains and once there are enough, I can start constructing indexes and a framework around them that will, more or less, create the platform. And in doing this, everyone has full control over how their profiles look, function, etc. along with all of their data. No giant mega-corporation can come and shove advertisements in our faces or tell us to get lost. We will own what we make, what we share, and how we connect. Everyone will be able to have their own subdomain which is, as I have stated in previous posts, your own piece of internet property basically. You could literally transform your entire user profile into a hobbyist website, business website, etc. whatever you want. You call the shots. Not a company. And what’s even better is that you get to share your home of expression with others on a freely interconnected network that you can join or leave at any time and still retain everything you have published or organized. Below is a sample of an app container I built that mimics the interface of 2016, Amino. This app container would be like a client of sorts that can access user profiles and any public spaces that are open on the new platform. And while the default profile will look like the one shown below, you would be free to make it look COMPLETELY different. Want buttons in different spots? Want to remove a section? Want to add links in a new section? The choices are yours my friend! That is the beauty of web design. If you are interested in being an early supporter of this project, feel free to direct message me here on the Mega Man amino. If we can even get 20 users created within this new network by November, we will already be light years ahead of where the Amino app is at now. No ads, no bullshit, no monetary crap. Just real freedom for hobbyists like you and me!