Sola

» see sola.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Plague launched in November 2014 with a distribution model nobody else had tried. You made a card, which could be a photo or a short piece of text, and the app sent it to the four nearest phones that also had Plague installed. Whoever received it could swipe up to pass it on, which sent it to their four nearest neighbors, or swipe down to stop it dead. Nobody followed anybody, and there was no feed assembled out of people you had chosen. A post moved through physical space by consent, one hop at a time, and either kept moving or it stopped.

It worked. In the first two months the app took 150,000 downloads and settled at around 38,000 daily active users, which for a social app with no social graph at all is a real result. It was made by Deep Sea Marketing, a Lithuanian outfit, and the public face of it was Ilya Zudin, who had been working with his co-founder Pavel Panov since 2011.

Then the name went. Ndemic Creations, who make the pandemic simulation game Plague Inc., pointed out that two popular apps called Plague was one too many and asked for a change. In March 2015 the app became Plag, with the logo rendering the missing letters as two blacked-out boxes, which is the most 2015 solution to a trademark problem imaginable. Growth continued through the year, a web client arrived in March 2016, and a chatbot got bolted on.

The third name was the expensive one. In March 2017 the team began rebuilding Plag into Sola, short for social layer, with an AI distribution engine replacing the proximity rule and a cryptocurrency underneath it. An internal alpha ran in August 2017, a public beta in September, the app shipped in October, and the token sale ran from 27 November to 22 December 2017 and raised $2,233,700. The pitch was revenue sharing: SOL tokens would pass advertising and partnership money back to the people making the content, and users could run Sola nodes on their own machines and be paid per post delivered. The marketing claimed the resulting network could not be shut down once it was launched.

It was shut down on 10 April 2019 at noon UTC, by the company that made it, nine days after a tweet announcing it.

~ the case file ~

~ the name problem ~

Three names in under five years is usually a sign of a product searching for its market, but the sequence here is more specific than that. Plague described the mechanism exactly, so the name did half the explaining for you. Plag described nothing at all and existed purely because a letter had arrived from somebody's lawyer. By the time the third name landed, it was describing an ambition, which is what tends to happen when a roadmap has a token sale on it.

What survived all three renamings was the underlying idea that you should not have to accumulate followers to be read. That part was good in 2014 and it is still good. The mechanism for delivering it got swapped out twice.

~ the token ~

Sola's ICO sat in the exact middle of the late-2017 window when a working app with 600,000 users could raise two million dollars in under a month on a whitepaper about rewarding creators. The specific promise was unusually concrete for the genre. Advertising revenue and partnership money would flow back to users as SOL, and anyone hosting a node would earn tokens for each post their machine delivered. Decentralization was both the product architecture and the marketing: without a central authority, the pitch went, nobody could switch the network off.

No shutdown reason was ever published, so the cause has to be read off the context: 2018 took the floor out of the ICO market, and a very large number of token-funded consumer products stopped being funded during it. The decentralization claim did not survive contact with the balance sheet either, because the archive record shows Sola running on its own CDN at cdn.solacore.net plus Amazon S3, both of which bill monthly.

~ the day it died ~

The notice came from the @solaplatform Twitter account on 1 April 2019, which is a date that cost them some credibility they could not spare. It gave users until 12:00 GMT on 10 April and told them to request a post export in the app, with the download link mailed to their account address.

Archive Team spent the nine days scraping the API for profile and post URLs and pulled 1.01 TiB off Sola's CDN and S3 buckets over the weekend after the shutdown. A distributed grab assembled on the fly managed about 307 user accounts before the lights went out. The ArchiveBot jobs that walked the profile URLs mostly failed to capture the posts themselves, because Sola's URL structure put post pages outside the parent path the crawler was willing to follow.

~ what it was competing with ~

The proximity-spreading idea needs density to work, and density is the thing a 38,000-user app cannot manufacture. If the four nearest phones running Plague are in three different countries, the mechanism is just a random feed with extra steps. That constraint is why apps like this one tend to catch in a dormitory or a single city and then stall, and it is the same wall Yik Yak hit from the other direction by drawing a radius on purpose and staying inside it.

sola.ai today serves a live software company doing process automation, unrelated to any of this and trading under the same four letters. Nothing on it mentions the 600,000 people who had an account on that address in 2018.

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