Join the Alpha – Expect Bugs, Embrace the Past!

We're thrilled to announce the public alpha release of our new platform — an initiative built to put artists and users back in control of their digital lives.

This is an alpha release, which means you should expect many rough edges, bugs, and features that are still evolving. This phase is crucial for us to gather feedback, prioritize functionality, and refine the platform as we grow.

Please note: This alpha is currently available for Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS only and requires basic technical proficiency.

TL;DR

• at cost private cloud storage for any data you want to store.
• musicians/journalists receive 100% of the profits they generate driven by users subscribing/consuming their content.
• shared content reduces the costs for users storing that content.

What We're Building

We are building a personal media platform to bring content creators and users together in a cooperative ecosystem. This system allows users to directly support their favorite creators at no extra cost, while making it easy for creators to actually make a living doing what they love.

Founders Plan

To help with adoption, we're offering direct access to our founders plan. Our founders plan provides all the functionality of our premium plan minus features that incur usage-based costs for the cost of our personal plan.

Currently, this includes:

• reduced storage costs, if you wish to go above the plan's base storage limits you'll be charged a reduced rate.
• mobile app support.
• user management.
• a direct voice in feature prioritization.
• content creators who join with the founders plan will receive 100% of the profits from storage.

We plan for our founders' subscriptions to represent 1% of our user base (both for content creators and fans) and will randomly offer access to our user base to maintain that percentage.

How it Works

• Infrastructure: Retrovibed provides the software and infrastructure for users to store whatever digital media they want to keep (think iCloud, Google Drive, etc.). The basic plan is $6/month for 2 TB of data — half the price of the major cloud providers.
• Publishing: Content creators upload their content to the platform and mark it for publishing.
• Archiving: Users subscribe to creators and archive their favorite media into their own cloud storage.

Once the three events above happen, the platform does the following:

• Storage Sharing: For each user that archives content, the total amount of storage used for that particular piece of data is decreased for every user. Essentially, the more users who archive the media, the less space the data takes up against each user's storage limit.
• Profit Generation: Since the reduction isn't a full split between users, the platform makes a profit each time data is archived because the storage backend isn't duplicated.
• Creator Payouts: The profit the platform makes is then shared with the content creator. We are still finalizing the exact split, but we are aiming for 100% for musicians/quality journalism and ~70% for other media types.

Privacy

Retrovibed is committed to personal privacy, both for content publishers who live under authoritarian regimes and for users. As such, all content uploaded into our system is encrypted and publishing can be done completely anonymously. This means that while we might be able to dedup community data, we won't necessarily be able to tell what that data is if it's being distributed without leveraging our platform's distribution nodes.

We've focused on integrating privacy-preserving functionality directly into the application seamlessly without complicated setup, and we plan to continue expanding that with more robust systems. For the technically inclined, we currently support WireGuard VPNs and we're looking to integrate I2P, a peer-to-peer routing protocol.

The application also comes with a built-in SOCKS5 proxy for securing your browser traffic if you're looking for an easy way to set up privacy there.

In short: we don't need to track you, we don't want to track you, and we're going to make every effort to make sure you have the privacy that you're entitled to. Now, granted some things like monetization for creators will be counter to this goal, but we'll limit such data gathering to only content that is monetized within Retrovibed's platform and we'll be thinking of ways to anonymize that as well in the future.

Future Work

Beyond bug fixes and UI improvements which will be constant (yay software!) we have a number of milestones we're planning, some based on our userbase.

General

No particular order but these are the final bits for a fully featured system.

• basic recommendation system.
• publisher nodes.
• distributed indexing.

Userbase milestones

2k founder subscriptions

• register as non-profit.
• retrovibed becomes self sustaining (infrastructure is fully funded).
• publicly release mobile apps/flatpak.

8k founder subscriptions

• setup infrastructure for founder driven feature prioritization.
• we begin onboarding our team (we already have the team just need the revenue so they can leave their current full time roles, this includes a ux designer).

16k founder subscriptions

• perform and publish security audit/pen testing within 8 months, and then on a yearly cadence.
• close founder subscriptions signup and replace with base plans.
• new founder subscriptions will be randomly selected from our user base going forward to maintain a 1% founder plan subscription base.
• release windows installer.