Stash Hub is a sewing organiser app. You can manage your fabrics, patterns, notions and more. You can even bring it all together into projects. It’s basically inventory management and project management for your sewing life, all in one place.
Users have asked for ways to share parts of their stash and their projects with other people, so it’s a fair question: why not just add social features to Stash Hub?
Technical reasons
The entire tech stack of Stash Hub was built with the assumption that there would be minimal, if any, social features. This was intentional from the start.
I didn’t want Stash Hub to become a social platform. Social features bring a lot of extra responsibility: moderation, reporting, privacy, abuse prevention and all the other complexities that come with people interacting publicly online.
That’s not to say it can’t, or won’t, ever happen in the future. But it would require a lot of infrastructure changes, and I don’t think bolting social features onto Stash Hub is the right first move.
I also strongly believe in data sovereignty, which becomes even more important when someone’s social graph is involved. In simple terms, I don’t want people’s creative identity, posts and connections to be locked inside one app forever.
Building Craftsky on the ATProtocol means users have more ownership. It was made for social platforms, and it solves a lot of the problems I would otherwise have to build from scratch.
Multiple types of crafts
Stash Hub is currently just for sewing and garment making. The plan is to expand it to work for other crafts in the future, but that is another big rewrite.
Craftsky is solving a problem that exists right now. People want to share what they’re making, discover other makers, find inspiration and connect with people who understand their craft.
For Craftsky to be successful, I believe it needs to work for all textile crafts. Lots of crafters don’t just sew. They knit, crochet, quilt, embroider, spin, weave and do all sorts of other things too. A social platform for makers needs to reflect that.
Doing too much
There is also a real risk that adding social features to Stash Hub would make an already feature-rich app overly complex and harder to use.
I have spent a lot of time and effort making Stash Hub the best at what it does. It is a tool for managing your stash, planning projects and helping you actually use the supplies you already have.
Adding feeds, follows, likes, comments and public profiles directly into that experience could easily make the app feel more cluttered. It would also make it harder to maintain.
Sometimes the best thing for a product is not to make it do everything.
The big plan
If/when, Craftsky is successful, I think the best move will be to add social features to Stash Hub through Craftsky.
That is also something I would encourage other crafting platforms to do: shops, apps, communities, blogs, marketplaces and anything else in the craft world.
Because Craftsky is open source and built in the ATmosphere, the wider ATProtocol ecosystem, it should be relatively straightforward for other developers to build integrations too.
I actually think this might be the biggest goal for me as the developer of Craftsky: not just to build another app, but to help create something that other people can build on as well. I’d love to see other developers contribute, experiment and create their own platforms that connect into the same wider network.
Don’t forget about Stash Hub
I will still be devoting a large portion of my time to Stash Hub. There is still plenty to improve, and it is still the main source of income for me and my partner.
Craftsky is not replacing Stash Hub. They solve different problems.
Stash Hub is still the place to organise your sewing life.
Craftsky is being built as the social layer for the wider textile craft world.