Jacob Ringler

A little maintenance behind the leaves 🔧 We’ve applied the latest security fixes to the push notification and account migration services powering @leafplaza.eu. Updated, checked, and running smoothly.

Your plaza just got a little louder 🔔 @leafplaza.eu 1.8 is live! Likes, replies, mentions and DMs can find you, even when the app is closed. Built with our own notification backend, hosted in the EU. Your notifications, your rules. Switch them on in Settings → Notifications.

I’m starting to think our biggest competitor is the thought of creating another social media account. You can try @leafplaza.eu with your existing AT Protocol account. Same account, different app. Now I need to get better at explaining it 😂

Open protocols are supposed to create choice. But choice needs transparency. The European Ombudsman has opened an inquiry into how the Commission selected its AT Protocol platform. Public institutions should be able to explain their decisions. That’s good for everyone in the ecosystem.

Moving to @leafplaza.eu just got a lot easier. 🚚 📦 Enter your handle. Sign in. We copy your posts, media and account data, verify it made it across, then one final button to move. No PDS URLs. No migration tools. No starting over. Your identity. Your history. Your move. migrate.leafplaza.eu

@leafplaza.eu 1.7 moves in-app translation from Google Translate to DeepL. The experience stays simple. Tap Translate and keep reading. Behind the scenes, the stack is more European. 🇪🇺 LeafPlaza in Estonia. DeepL in Germany. @scaleway.com in France. Better UX, cleaner architecture, more control.

Building decentralized social media: Identity. Federation. Data sovereignty. Distributed infrastructure. Also: Why is this avatar an oval?

One useful thing about building @leafplaza.eu in public. Someone will always find the sentence you thought was perfectly clear and ask the exact question that proves it wasn’t. Honestly helpful. Mildly humbling. 😂

One advantage of building @leafplaza.eu with a small team. The person reading your bug report might be the same person who caused it 😂 That’s a fast and efficient loop.

Supporting compatible PDS providers sounded like a simple login change. Nice and easy. Well, that's before every assumption in the app about where an account lives raised its hand 😂

One lesson from the LeafPlaza 1.6 release is that removing a dependency can be more valuable than adding a feature. Nobody opens the app excited that there’s one less service behind it. I do.

Life as a @leafplaza.eu co-founder: “Today I’m improving product analytics so we can make better decisions.” Also me, spending half the morning trying to make three dashboards talk to each other.

One thing I learned adding privacy friendly analytics to LeafPlaza: Apple and Google can ask about the same app and same data in completely different ways. The code was the easy part. Privacy engineering involves a surprising amount of careful reading. 📋

LeafPlaza 1.6 is with Apple and Google. No shiny new button this time. We've been tidying the engine room. Privacy-friendly analytics through @telemetrydeck.com, fewer inherited services, and more of the client under LeafPlaza's control. Small release. Stronger plaza. ⚙️

A big milestone for our small European team: @leafplaza.eu is now available worldwide. 🌍 Join our managed service, or use the client with a compatible AT Protocol account or your own PDS. The client is open. Your provider is your choice. www.leafplaza.eu

LeafPlaza 1.5 is live. We heard the feedback. We’ll always encourage people to create an account with @leafplaza.eu, hosted on our EU PDS in Frankfurt, but accounts hosted elsewhere can now use our iOS and Android apps too. No migration. No moving van required. 🚚 The plaza just got bigger.

LeafPlaza 1.4 is rolling out on iOS and Android. GIFs are behaving again. We had a serious talk. A few behind-the-scenes improvements too. Update and let @leafplaza.eu know if anything looks odd.

Every app release reminds me that shipping on two platforms is always a little different. Android: ✅ Apple: "We have a few questions..." 😅 As is tradition.

LeafPlaza 1.3 is rolling out. One of the improvements in this release makes messages in Dim mode much easier to read. Thanks to everyone who pointed it out.

Build communities. Not lock-in.

Your account should belong to you. Radical, apparently.

Nobody asked for another social network. They asked for ownership. Ownership of their account. Ownership of their identity. Ownership of their data. Social media is just the interface. The real product is control.

Every week the internet invents a new reason for LeafPlaza to exist. This was a particularly productive week.

The best time to think about digital sovereignty is before you need it.

Someone just started using LeafPlaza and their first post was night photography from Tokyo. Feels like it’s less about where you are, more about where your data lives.

Protocols > platforms.

Owning your identity online should be normal.

Your follows and posts should move with you. That’s the point of AT Protocol. We’re helping people migrate. Come as you are. 🌿

Dark mode is coming to @leafplaza.eu. Almost there. Even Batman would approve.

LeafPlaza OÜ is registered in Estonia. EU company, EU law, EU infrastructure. Not a US company with a GDPR checkbox. Actually European.

EU infrastructure isn’t a limitation. It’s a guarantee. One thing I kept coming back to is how little clarity there is around where our social data actually lives, and which laws apply to it. With @leafplaza.eu, we wanted to make that explicit. Available worldwide. Your data stays under EU law.

LeafPlaza is live. If you’re reading this, you’re early. Welcome. 🌿