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.
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.
Content creators get a platform where they control their media with multiple revenue generating streams.
per stream revenue based on the amount of time a user spends on your content. if a user spends 80% of their time listening to your content, you get 80% of their subcription profits. not fraction of a cent per stream.
storage revenue when users add your content to their archive. independent musicians/journalists receive 100% of this revenue.
recruitment revenue for new users signing up to view your content.
Users get a polished entertainment platform they control with some nice side benefits.
To help with adoption, we're offering 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:
Beyond the cost and feature perks, our long term plan for the founders plan is to give our user base a direct voice regarding feature prioritization. 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 members to maintain that percentage.
Once the three events above happen, the platform does the following:
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.
Beyond bug fixes and UI improvements which will be constant (yay software!) we have a few big bits remaining, in no particular order:
those are the last three major features we're working on and why we're offering the founders plan today.
For those who made it this far, damn. thanks for reading this. We're super excited for those who decide to join us on this journey and we're very excited to meet you in our founders group.