Over the last few years, I've built an app called Giraf, for sharing and discovering cultural life [0]. "Cultural life" encompasses any kind of creative work (music, books, films, paintings, poems, podcasts, etc.), as well as events (concerts, film screenings, museum exhibitions, book events, etc.), places (museums, parks, bookstores, etc.), and the artists themselves who create these things.
Giraf is essentially a knowledge graph plus a social network. The knowledge graph consists of all the cultural things just mentioned, as well as facts about relationships between them (e.g. song P is by artist Q, who's playing concert R, at music venue S). The social network is built around posts of items from the knowledge graph. You can reply to posts with thanks, comments, or suggestions. A suggestion features another item from the knowledge graph -- so it provides a way to say "if you like X, you should check out Y". The social network uses a follow-based mechanic that will be familiar from other social apps, but it's fully human-powered; there's no algorithmic curation.
Giraf represents the use case for social media that has always appealed to me. Most people, whether they'd think of it in these terms or not, are on a lifelong journey of cultural exploration -- listening to music, reading books, watching films, going to shows, visiting places that in some way embody local culture, and so on. Giraf is meant to be a tool that serves this journey.
The app has been really useful among my group of friends over the last few years, for exchanging recommendations in a low-key, async way. It turns out that a dedicated tool like this can bring out a lot of fruitful communication that wouldn't have been brought out in a group chat.
I'm now opening up Giraf to a wider audience. If the idea resonates with you, please check it out and give it a try! And I welcome any and all feedback here.
I'm committed to Giraf for the long term. My goal is to make Giraf financially viable, solely out of revenue from users who find it valuable and want to support it. To that end, I've built an optional, Patreon-style membership functionality [1].
Thanks for reading, and thanks for checking out Giraf!
Ian Hinsdale
