How an Instagram page became an app

Chunky Guys started as an Instagram page in 2016. The original plan was simple: build a following, share good content, maybe feature myself occasionally. Classic social media strategy.

But something shifted pretty quickly. I'd see other pages doing the same thing, but posting photos without tagging the people in them. You'd see someone you wanted to know more about, and... nothing. No profile link, no way to connect. It felt lazy and kind of disrespectful. These were real people, not just content to be consumed.

So I made a rule: every post gets tagged properly. Always. If someone catches your eye, you should be able to tap through and find them.

The weird thing is, the posts where I featured myself never stayed up long. I'd post something, then take it down a few days later. I realised I preferred being behind the curtain: curating, connecting people, making things happen rather than being the thing happening. The page grew, the community responded, and somewhere along the way it stopped being about building my following and became about building something for the community.

The app that wouldn't happen

I'd been trying to build a bear community app for years. Multiple attempts, multiple failures. The problem was always the same: how do you bootstrap a social network from scratch? You need users to attract users, but no one joins an empty platform. It's a brutal chicken-and-egg problem, especially in an already saturated market.

Then Bluesky launched.

Suddenly there was a way forward. The AT Protocol meant I didn't have to build a social network from zero. There was already an existing userbase, infrastructure to build on, open standards. I could focus on building the features the community actually wanted instead of solving the cold-start problem for the thousandth time.

What the community actually wants

Bluesky is building for everyone, which means they're not building specifically for us. That's not a criticism, it's just reality. A general-purpose platform can't prioritise niche community needs.

Our community wants something more nuanced than what mainstream platforms offer. Media messaging, for one: photos and videos are how many of us communicate and connect, especially when privacy matters. Better discovery tools that let you find the people you want to connect with. Ways to build genuine connections. Bluesky doesn't offer it. We do.

And honestly? We're not interested in building another hook-up app; there are plenty of apps optimised for that. What's missing is a space where you can actually build friendships, where connection goes deeper than stats and photos, where community matters as much as individual connections.

Why Europe

The infrastructure runs on European servers. Not because it's cheaper or easier (it's not), but because your data is your data. Bluesky gets this at the protocol level: data portability and ownership are baked in. We take it a step further by keeping everything under European data protection laws.

Part of that is a reaction to big tech. Part of it is watching recent policy become increasingly unpredictable. Europeans value privacy from capitalist surveillance, and that's not just a marketing line. It's a design constraint that shapes how we build.

What this blog is for

This is where we'll share what we're working on, why certain decisions are made, what's coming next, and what we're learning along the way. Some posts will be technical. Others will be about product direction or community feedback. Sometimes it'll just be thinking out loud.

We're figuring this out as we go. Together, let's see where it leads.