Ask HN: Feedback for a New Social App
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
I'm working on an app called Mu (Micro shortened). Its an all in one app for mail, chat, news and video. The mail part coming soon and the chat being with AI (a model called Fanar from the state of Qatar). It stems from my pain with social and productivity apps. I'm finding a number of problems and decided to try build something for myself to help. But I wanted to see if it interested anyone else or if I could get feedback.
The problems:
- YouTube is quite addictive. I find myself constantly refreshing to find new video recommendations or fighting swiping short videos. I thought I had escaped that by not having an Instagram account or TikTok but turns out when that functionality is elsewhere it really sucks you in easily. I built a video feed and search using the YouTube api that provides a fixed set of channels and organises by latest.
- News. I am constantly opening various websites to read the news. Whether it's here or BBC or something else, and I've tried stuff like Feedly but I found over time it was causing me to scroll a ton. So it's a fixed set of RSS feeds and I have a latest headline from each feed. I'm sure there's better ways to organise it but I found my use of AI poor for that. So easier to look at the latest thing.
- Chat with AI. I guess this is a no brainer but I got tired of going to Gemini or OpenAI. It feels like what they want to create is an immersive human like experience. Whereas what I wanted was a simple objective model that provided me almost wiki like information. I don't need more than that. I also wanted something that understands the other half of the world. Fanar a model from the state of Qatar basically uses Google's Gemma but trains slightly different for I guess a more Arabic and less western context. I'm finding it works fine for most of what I need.
- Home screen. I guess there are other dashboards like glance but I wanted sort of a single home screen overview for these various items. Displaying the latest video and headlines and then providing room to add other aspects as needed. There really isn't a home screen for the web. I guess this is what internet start pages like msn used to be.
- Mail that's not Gmail - there is a need to communicate with other human beings but I don't necessarily want to hand out my personal email everywhere. It would be useful to have a separate inbox that isn't work and isn't personal but sort of specifically for social. I feel like X and Facebook and others sort of miss out on this. They have proprietary messengers and groups but lack of mailing lists and email is an issue. Having a slow way to communicate that isn't wholly public would be useful. I haven't built it yet just because I want to get it right rather than wasting a lot of time building yet another email client.
Anyway looking for a bit of feedback. Would appreciate thoughts or tweaks that might be worth making.