Show HN: Preserve your families legacy for centuries | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Preserve your families legacy for centuries

clann.app

6 pointsVarunPotti16 comments

Hey everyone, creator of clann.app here.

I will try to keep this short but at the end of the day you will be forgotten one day. I know this feels sad and it really is. I mean ask yourself who your great-grandfather is, you don't know!

Heck, we don't even know how they lived their life. Now their generation had very little access to computers let alone the internet. The problem isn't about the future knowing who you are but them understanding how your generation lived their life.

Further we often tend to forget about our extended family. I am from India and after every single exam someone from my extended family who I met ONCE in my life would ask me my results. I would rarely know how they are related to me. This is a problem. Further dinner table discussions about how people are related to me are always a pain. Why? Sometimes even my parents don't know!

The Solution? What if you could get your entire family into the digital world, Yes, it is possible! Upload images (feature name: memories) of your family today so that your future generations would truly appreciate how much their lives have improved. Clann is built for intergenerational use and has a robust invites system (feature name: groups, invites) so that you only allow your extended family members to see a certain family. If you have any queries you can contact me on @PottiVarun.

Think of Clann as Figma for families. Get your entire family on there, Invite other families (relatives) and link each family by how they are related. Everything is in a clean flow char based UI.

The link is https://clann.app.

You and I need to be remembered for the coming centuries. We need to leave a mark on this world. Lets leave a small digital footprint so that the future understands and appreciates their world!

Goodbye!

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Before the computers and the internet, some people kept diaries. (A diary is like a blogging with pen and paper).

So yes, I know that on August 30, 1823 great^n grampa spent the day haying. Because he wrote it down on paper. Maybe -- if your blog survives 200 years -- your great^n grandchildren will look back and know that you spent August 30, 2023 docking a grunt file or whatever. And will probably be very confused.

Hey VarunPotti,

My feedback would be that there isn't really a "shiny product". The screenshots show a basic graph of a few members with a single trip put in there. There's nothing compelling to cause me to want to use the app.

Maybe you could show a much bigger family tree, with actual photos of people, and lots of photos of trips, and show how this could give you a feeling of wholeness at having such a large family and their relationships shown in one place.

Agree with you, might get pictures of my own family to be shown once all my relatives start using it.

https://www.wikitree.com/ is essentially this but free and community driven.

Some reassuring words and a sign up .... this is HN.

This is bs people… don’t fall for this crap.

Just keep physical photo albums and digitize everything, there’s a million and one backup solutions that allow you to control your physical disk or even cloud based solutions that are as easy as drag and drop.

Never trust some random service with your valuable data and memories.

—-

Side note: if author is worth their salt they would’ve posted this with their main account, not a throwaway with 39 karma, this means -at best- that this is a weekend project and the dude doesn’t want this to fall back to them if it turns out to be crap. You don’t want to upload your real stuff some some crummy copy pasta weekend hack bullshit.

It's their main account, with their real name, it's not a throwaway. Yes it's misleading but relax, it's a 15 year old.

Open to feedback on how to better word my products and product development in general!

I would’ve worded it differently if I had known it’s a 15 yo, sorry about that OP. But the gist is still true, it doesn’t hurt to hear the truth raw every once in a while.

Yep, definitely helps me in the long run. I noticed my flaws in the wording and I am sorry about that. Will be working on my flaws and learn from my mistakes.

Furthermore there is no internet company I would trust to keep my data for 100 years. (Because what internet things don't shut down after like 10 years OR require a recurring payment that might fail). That is a wild claim! The only remotely possible way might be blockchain (but that'll be stupidly expensive) or more simply, a normal public blog that gets indexed by the internet archive.

True, could have worded it better. I still think how I can have the data preserved for more than 100 years, I haven't yet found a way. I did find a few methods but I felt that they would put the privacy at risk. One was using blockchain (which as you told is stupidly expensive) and the other one was using distributed databases like https://gun.eco/ with a few nodes hosted around the world (kinda like nostr).

Even if the platform manages to stay alive for 50 years is a big W in my book! The older generations know about their histories but they never tell the newer generations because time is limited. This leads to the newer generations not knowing their roots.

The problem with 100 years time. Imagine someone like you set up something like this in 1923, and that someone is now dead, and their kids had no interest in keeping it going, infact they had financial problems so sold the site for $50 to someone who let it lapse. You see you need to coordinate people from beyond the grave... a bit like the US Constitution. Hell even countries (in their political form) often don't last 100 years. I am not saying it is impossible, but it is hard, so you need to convince people you are serious. Which might mean, for example working for the internet archive, or a large museum with digital presence for a few years in a senior position, etc. then coming and saying "I am starting this and I know all about keeping stuff around for decades"

Haha, I kinda agree but I also disagree. I completely understand, and this was never a weekend project to begin with. I am trying to get a concept out and I have already got my family to use it (parents). Sure in some cases you can call it a POC.

The goal for clann was to streamline and make it easy for you to preserve memories. Sure you can go with cloud providers if you wanted to. Further I am not forcing people to upload images and put proper birthdays in their family trees. What I am letting them know is you can just have the names (which for the most part are public) and connect the members.

Some more raw feedback:

Words like “streamline” are meaningless.

You sound like you know how web apps work even at your age, so you would know that what you’re saying is near impossible without a ton of reputation, money and history in the business. Saying that you’re not forcing anyone to do upload their valuable images or data while at the same time it’s exactly what your marketing copy suggests strikes me now as a bit scammy (not saying you’re a scammer, just letting you know how it sounds) just like a lot of those crypto scammers who eventually say that they didn’t force anyone to invest.

You seem capable and smart, don't fall into the trap that many HN lurkers fall into, which is thinking that they can build a whatever product to get some attention and then hopefully something comes out of it, you don’t have to waste your time on this stuff, or others for that matter.

Thank you so much for the feedback. Honestly most people give me sugar coated feedback and it feels good to know my flaws and fix them.

Will definitely work on making my wording better.

I agree with you on the "waste your time". Wanted to experiment with it, While I will continue doing the little maintenance required for the existing users, I have shifted my attention to more open source products.

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