sweet.sh was an experimental social network that got hundreds of signups from people on my corner of the Internet in 2019 and 2020. It was a project started by a guy I met there named Raphael Kabo, who was writing about utopias at the time for his PhD thesis. In accordance with this, he created a social network with innovative features, such as groups where the members voted on rules governing things like the group name and description or the public visibility of posts or the ability of people to join without approval.

When I initially found this project, I had no idea that a solo developer (or a small team) could create something this ambitious and useful in their spare time. I had never used Node.js, MongoDB, Webpack, or any of the other ubiquitous tools of independent full-stack web development before. This project became the main focus of my life outside of school in the spring and summer of 2019, and I've been feeling its impact ever since. I worked a lot on managing the database schema and migrations on the backend and on the rich-text-and-images content authoring tool on the frontend.