Decentered S1E2: Making Sora, with Takiyoshi Hoshida
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In today’s episode, we had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Takiyoshi Hoshida. Hoshida, otherwise known online as MszPro, is a prolific iOS app developer with more than a dozen App Store entries to his name. His biggest, latest development is a multi-platform social client called Sora.
Sora is a special kind of fediverse app in that it supports several different kinds of platforms at once: users can use Sora for not only Mastodon, but Misskey, Firefish…and Bluesky. It comes with a veritable Swiss Army Knife of unique features, a beautiful design, and works across the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.
Show Notes
Personal Story:
- Hoshida got his start with software development in primary school, where he figured out how to make websites in basic HTML. Some of his early interest involved adding cool animated pictures to his Powerpoint presentations.
- To serve his personal website, Hoshida bought his own server and ran it in his room!
- First iOS app: GlucoSecrets, a tool for his grandparents to monitor their blood glucose levels!
- His development efforts drew him further towards Computer Science, and he pursued a summer opportunity at Stanford and later studied at Carnegie-Melon University.
- Worked with Apple’s ARkit team in 2019 and 2020.
- Hoshida’s own estimate for the amount of apps he’s done development on is somewhere around 50+ iOS projects.Making Sora, with Takiyoshi Hoshida
About Sora
- What’s in a name? Sora means “Sky” in Japanese, and has two different aspects: day and night. To Hoshida, the Day Sky represents openness and the ability to be heard, and the Night Sky represents an ability to observe other parts of the social network from a distance, to discover new things.
- Initial experience with Mastodon: discovery wasn’t great, it was hard to find interesting content and people. The empty screen and onboarding process left an impression, and he went on to create his own process within Sora.
- Hoshida says that Sora offers an AI-predictive discovery feature for content. What’s unique about his approach is that the machine learning model is done entirely locally in the client, rather than in the cloud.
- “AI? Eh, it’s not really AI, it’s just math and statistics”
- One challenge with developing a multi-platform client: not every platform supports the same features. Bluesky doesn’t natively support bookmarks, so Hoshida had to develop a way around that within his own app.
- Upcoming areas of interest? Voice broadcasting, audio and video calls, maybe a VisionOS app? Who knows. He’s currently tinkering, and uses his own app daily.
- Sean really hopes to see an Android version someday.
Hi team,
Loving the new podcast and the Sora app has some interesting ideas.
Can I please just make one podcast technical suggestion to mix the audio in mono instead of stereo? The majority of this podcast was balanced to the left channel, which was distracting and impacted my focus on the discussion.
Apart from that, looking forward to future episodes.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! We’ll look into that moving forward – we’re still pretty new at this, and always looking at ways we can do better!