Coming Soon: SoshVault

I enjoy social media, and one thing I love seeing is when people play in the space and do things the tools weren't necessarily designed for. Back in good old days of Twitter (maybe 2012-2104), people used to do things like change their display names to a "spooky" one for halloween or they'd add a Santa hat to their avatar for just December.

But I disliked how any changes you made to your avatar/bio/profile were destructive, in that whatever new images or settings completely wiped out your old ones. Changing things back to how they were meant you had to re-find an old selfie or a previous copy of your about text, and that was always annoying.

I decided to build what I always wanted

Last weekend, I decided it was time to complete a project I've been thinking about for the past 15 years. I used OpenAI's Codex to help walk me through it.

I started with a prototype in HTML running on my local machine, and with Codex, soon it was wired up and successfully archiving and editing my live social media accounts at Mastodon and Bluesky. I could pull down my profile and images and text, edit any of them, and make them live from the app, and save copies of profiles with custom names.

Let's get Swift

After a day of chatting in Codex and testing in a browser, the prototype had every feature I wanted in a basic phone app, so I decided to move the concepts into an iOS app. Codex walked me through the setup in Xcode and wrangled all the necessary files. Then we had to rebuild each feature one by one into the iOS app. After another couple of days, I had it running on a custom app on my own phone, and the first version of this was complete.

Here are some screenshots of the app running on my phone, showing the front page, account switching, archive history, settings screen, and what a live profile looks like.

My favorite part was getting to build custom image cropping tools for making a square avatar out of any of your selfies and then a 1500x500px profile header image cropper, which I've never had an easy way of doing before.

Small, free, and easy

I know this is a very specific, niche utility, so I intend to keep it free on the App Store once my developer account is fully working. I'll announce on my social media accounts when the app is ready for testers in TestFlight, which should be a few more days. I suspect it'll take another couple weeks before it's available on the App Store widely, once it gets approved.

I'm happy I finally got this built, and I've been using it every couple of days since. I now have a backup of all my bluesky and mastodon profiles and images, and it'll be fun to play around on those networks again, knowing that I can always set things back to how they were. I'm also going to work on integrating iCloud, so backups are automatic, always in sync, and something you can move easily from one phone to another without losing any of your history.

I wish this app could save EVERY kind of social media profile, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, but most social networks have locked down their APIs and currently only Bluesky, Mastodon, and Slack offer profile editing from a remote API.

It's unfortunate the other networks behave as they do, since we, the users, bring all the value to those networks and things like our profiles and our following lists are something we created and get value from and we should get to control, import, export, and use them however we like.