This is more of a quick brain dump than a proper post.

I’ve been working on Refrakt for a little over a year and a half now. Recently however, I’ve not had the time or motivation to work on it as much as I probably should, and I can’t help but feel bad about that. Turns out, building and maintaining a social platform is harder than it seems.

I feel like there’s a couple of reasons as to why I’ve not been working on it as much as I used to.

The main reason is that I’m back working full-time. While I was freelancing, I could be a lot more flexible with my time, but lately I’m just fried by 6PM and that really diminishes my desire to continue coding for another 6-8 hours on Refrakt.

It also feels so daunting now. Refrakt is actually pretty mature technically, and it’s a surprisingly big surface area. I’ve added a lot of new features compared to the initial beta launch, and lots of stuff in the background too, but there’s still a lot to improve. I have a huge backlog of ideas I could build for Refrakt, most of which have been started in some way, but sitting down and finishing them feels harder than it should right now.

The last reason is that I truly suck at marketing Refrakt, even if I had the time. It just never feels genuine to “sell people on it” and would prefer it to just be all organic, word of mouth. I just know that organic growth is slow, and it feels like it hasn’t quite hit it’s critical mass yet. It’s a benefit in some ways because there’s a little less pressure, and the platform feels quiet which I kind of like. However it’s not that great for the people who use it. They deserve visibilty on their work, and it’s hard not to feel like other platforms may be better for that right now.

This isn’t the end of Refrakt by any means, just more of a technical pause.

I have just been thinking about taking a little break from development on it for a while. It feels like Refrakt could benefit from a massive simplification, and I have some ideas for semi-related projects that I’d like to mess around with and see if they could be the next iteration of Refrakt, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Ultimately, I want to make small fun projects for like minded folks, so that’s going to be my focus for the next little while. Utility apps, ways to organize and share work, and maybe even non-photography related projects too.

If you want to be involved, or have ideas, or just want to chat about Refrakt and photography in general, email me!

Thanks for reading, Sam.