The end of an era marks the beginning of a new one.

An article by Joel, founder of Okuna.

Hey there, how are things? Getting cozy and ready for the winter?

Over here at Somus, things are moving crazy fast. We’re now team of 7 working non-stop to bring Somus to life, early 2022.

This post will be a bit different as it’s not a post from the Okuna o Somus team, its a post from me, Joel.

⏳ The recap

I started working in what is now Somus, 3 years ago and people that have followed the Okuna journey, will know just how many ups and downs occurred in between.

An initially failed Kickstarter campaign, legal battles with the F company, a last-minute cancelled subsidy leaving us in a terrible situation, criticism about the decisions we took in order to maintain a friendly and healthy platform, ~ 70 rejections from investors, and constant pressure to continue developing the platform, no days off.

Phew.

There were also many ups. A consequent successful Kickstarter campaign, being featured in major news outlets like TechCrunch, winning The Hague Innovators Award, but overall working these past years with the amazing and supporting community at Okuna is the peak of all ups.

With the smallest of budgets, together, we built something that people could consider an alternative to existing social media, something that saw people of all age ranges join, people beyond tech, cooks, painters, dancers, teachers, mechanics, you name it.

That’s a massive breakthrough that no other previous open-source, let alone, ethical alternative had accomplished and we should be proud about this.

🧐 What went wrong?

So if things were going so well, what actually went wrong? Growth comes with a price tag we could not afford.

I had over 70 chats with VCs, Investors, Angels and even retirement fund managers.

I failed. I couldn’t convince investors that our social-network-subscription business model was a viable alternative to the traditional seize users, keep them engaged and monetise their data social network model.

We came up with a plan for validating the business model, but for that too, we needed capital. We were stuck and people were ever more impatient and rightfully so, it had been almost a year and a half in beta.

🚀 The pivot

Enough was enough. By the end of 2019, having to return to the labor market, I took all of the painful lessons these past years, put them together in a new deck and Somus was born.

Two weeks later, we had our first investor on board and ever since, things have going accelerating upwards, having consequently closed a €300k round.

Which brings us to the main topic of the post.

🧘 Doing what must be done

Since the idea of Somus was born, I’ve wanted to ensure a smooth transition between Okuna and Somus, now, a few months later, I’ve come to see it as unfeasible and that left unattended, will become an expectations crisis.

Somus shares the vision of Okuna. Being a healthy, privacy-friendy and ethical social network, however in order to get there, we have to build a sustainable business first.

Unfortunately, we came to realise through user experience research that many of the things that Okuna as a platform has, such as lists, circles and communities, at this early stage, are liabilities to that goal.

We get one opportunity to get Somus right, so we did what we had to and disabled everything that was not in line with this new proposition.

It wasn’t easy. I spent spent thousands of hours, days and nights, staying up until 3AM, building many of these features, I would love to have it all out there on day one, but, Somus must succeed, and we must change everything we have to, but our ideals and vision to do so.

After making this decision, we planned to keep the platforms running in parallel while Somus becomes a suitable replacement for Okuna users but unfortunately, this too I’m afraid, won’t work.

Okuna is at an all-time-low in Patreon contributions, at the point that I’m personally covering the platform costs, frustration, skepticism and upset in the platform is at an all time high and things like notifications, trending pages and even posts processing are breaking all the time because we’re busy working on making Somus a success.

Apple too have recently suspended our account on suspicion that we misused TestFlight for launching an app, circumventing their submission process…

Things are just not looking good for the platform as it is, and the longer we let them unfold, the worse they will become.

With all of this in mind, we have made the tough decision to shut down Okuna until Somus is a sustainable business and a feasible replacement.

We expect this to happen in 2022, when specifically, depends on a lot of factors we cannot account for at the moment.

While this is of course incredibly sad news for all Okuna enthusiasts, myself included, its should also serve as an indicator that a new era for this project has begun where we have found a conviction and laser focus like never before to make this a success.

I also know a lot of people will be angry and disappointed by the decision but l hope that in due time, under better circumstances, they will be able to forgive us.

🏡 A temporary home

Along these past 3 years, we’ve made and have seen incredible friendships made in Okuna. It would be nothing short of a tragedy to lose contact.

That’s why, while Somus grows into a suitable replacement of Okuna, we are opening a Discord server for anyone interested in keeping in touch, which you can join here.

🙋 The pressing questions

Finally, here’s a list of what we believe will be the most pressing questions on this.

When will the Okuna servers go offline?

The Okuna servers will be powered off on December 15th, 2021.

What will happen with my Okuna profile?

If your account is not deleted by then, your data will remain frozen in the very same database and location it currently is.

When Somus reaches its suitable replacement status, we will email all Okuna users asking whether they would like to use it to create a profile on Somus, founder badges included.

If we don’t hear back from you then, your data will be permanently deleted.

What will happen to the Okuna Slack channel?

It will be archived on the same day.

What will happen to the Okuna source code?

We will change the license from to MIT so that if someone would like to continue in the exact direction that Okuna was going, can do so by setting up their own instance, no restrictions.

🕊 Until we meet again

This is not an end, but a beginning.

It’s been an incredible honour to share this adventure with you and l look forward to continue doing so with Somus.

Thank you, thank you and a million times thank you for your support throughout the years, for being there to celebrate the ups, as well for being there to get through the downs together.

We won’t forget you, and in due time, we look forward to compensating you in more ways than exclusive badges, because you’ve been more than a founder, you’ve been a pioneer.

— Joel from Okuna.