friends!forever started in one part as a Ruby on Rails learning project and in another part as a joke. "It would be fun if you could add a friend but couldn’t delete one, huh" is what I told myself at the time. As I was developing it further, I became more fond of the idea and crystallized the concept more. For now, friends!forever is what Twitter was when it first launched (but with 1500 character limit) that focuses solely on staying in touch with people you know in real life, plus a touch of Basecamp. For me, it’s a middle ground between botnet "social" networks and the fediverse that many people still don’t get. It’s just a simple tool to keep in touch with friends and plan stuff together, nothing more.There’s no business model, so I don’t need to collect any user’s personal data and try to sell it to anyone. Plus, it has some goodies like transparent app-level encryption, so the database contents are gibberish to an outside observer. How am I going to make money off of it? I’m not going to. This thing runs on my spite and money from my pocket.