Our Story

Established in September 2021, NeoDB is an open source project and free service to help users around the world share and discover reviews and ratings of books, movies, music and games in the Fediverse and Atmosphere without concern of tracking or censorship.

The community we serve today consists mostly of people who previously used social networks in China to share their reviews and ratings for books, movies, and music. By doing so for the last 15 years, they have made these reviews a rich form of archive that is the container of personal stories, intellectual debates, political opinions, and more. However, in recent years many of them have been suppressed and banned due to increasing censorship and authoritarian laws in China. Many users have lost trust in proprietary software and services in China. NeoDB started as a humble effort to build open source software and services to help these internet refugees recreate their social network identities, regain control of their own content, and share their discoveries and opinions with their friends freely in the Fediverse and, thanks to the openness of ActivityPub, the whole world.

As we’ve gained some initial traction, we expect to continue supporting this fast-growing community with better portability, security, and user experience; we also hope to connect our community with broader Fediverse and Atmosphere users with diverse backgrounds and serve both via enhanced a11y and i18n, a decentralized architecture, and interchangeable data formats and protocols for catalog information and user-generated content. Your support and donation will help us operate continuously and develop towards this vision with more confidence.

NeoDB is a fork of NiceDB and Takahē; our code is actively being developed and is open-sourced under the AGPL-v3 license. We highly welcome contributions in code, design, and localization.

Please follow us on Fediverse(en|cn) / Bluesky / Twitter, and help spread the word. Thank you for the support!