Our Story
=========

Established in September 2021, NeoDB is an [open source project](https://github.com/neodb-social/neodb) and [free service](https://neodb.social/) to help users around the world share and discover reviews and ratings of books, movies, music and games in Fediverse without concern of tracking or censorship.


The community that we serve today are mostly those previously used social networks in China to share their reviews and ratings for book, movie 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 got 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 identity, regain control of their own content, and share their discoveries and opinions with their friends freely in Fediverse and, thanks to the openness of ActivityPub, the whole world.


As we’ve gained some [initial attraction](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/12/mastodon-recap-2021/), 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 users with diverse backgrounds and serve both via enhanced a16y and i18n, decentralized architecture and interchangeable data format and protocols on catalogue 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](https://github.com/doubaniux/boofilsic), 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](https://mastodon.online/@neodb)|[cn](https://mastodon.social/@neodb)) / [Twitter](https://x.com/NeoDBsocial) / [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/neodb.bsky.social), and help spread the words. Thank you for the support!
