Finite Jest

I am struck by how accurately Wallace predicted the current state of social media. With the advent of AI and algorithmic feeds there has been an increasing loss of agency in how we engage with social media, which became increasingly optimized for addictive qualities and driving engagement through outrage.

I have read that being offline / having a circle of real life friends is now a status symbol. Though I wonder if this approach throws the baby with the bath water. I remember when facebook only showed me posts from friends rather than feeding me an endless scroll of video shorts from influencers, it was nice... no algorithms, just a dozen posts a day from my 100 friends that I knew IRL and cared about, even if we no longer lived in the same city.

I want to try to recapture some of that early web 2.0 feeling. Basically I want a website where:

• you can only post once or twice a day max
• you can view and interact with a limited amount of posts
• maybe you can setup a group for just you and 12 friends, but you still get to upload only a limited amount of times daily

 I did not find any existing application that fits this niche. But I can code (not frontend but that can't be too hard, right?). Thinking about Infinite Jest reminded me that this blog exists, and I decided to make it a "build in public" journal since the name fits the theme.

I am used to python, and can use FireStore to take care of a lot of authentication and DB management stuff... for frontend petite-vue might be enough for whatever I need (I have only ever really used vanilla JS... react gives me migraines) and bootstrap should be enough for styling. I heard this tech stack being called the "Petite Fire" stack

I will call this project "Finite Jest" when pushed together the letters F and J kind of look like the Kanji for 10,000 (the symbol 万) which I heard used to as a slang for "sure". So I will go with that as a logo for now.