Kolkata man starts social network to bring amateur writers together

“People think they cannot write, but I find a lot of them want to write but are afraid of sharing because what they have written will not be accepted as literature by society,” Maity tells indianexpress.com in an interview. Not everybody is likely to be satisfied concerning the want for a devoted social network when you may share your work with mates by way of platforms like Facebook. Maity, nevertheless, has a distinct opinion on why the Jiya app is a greater medium for writers than Facebook or LinkedIn. “The problem with Facebook or LinkedIn is that this kind of literary profile will not be built for you,” he says, including that you’ll by no means know what number of poems or tales you may have written as a result of these can be misplaced in numerous different put up feeds. Another benefit of the Jiya app is that there is no such thing as a size restriction, one thing that provides writers extra management over what they need to write. The free app additionally has a built-in textual content editor, which might make textual content look precisely the best way you need it to with the totally different fonts, sizes, and even line alignment. Then there may be additionally an choice to save a number of drafts without spending a dime which in a few of the rival writing apps it’s a paid function. There is a devoted class for poems, tales, letters, articles, standard dialogue and extra. Maity, who did his masters in pc software program engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, says he acquired the thought to begin a social network for literature again in 2017 however couldn’t spend time on conceptualising the product since he was working full time in a tech firm. But he did begin a Facebook web page devoted to writing and shortly it had grown to 30,000 followers. Upon coming back from the US in early 2020, Maity launched the Jiya app. “When we go to a gift store to buy cards or mugs, we just read the lines written on those cards but we never think who has written those lines,” Maity observes the dearth of acknowledgement given to writers for what they do. That considered writers not getting their due is what drove Maity to launch the Jiya app. The title Jiya, nevertheless, was urged by the writing group. “I believe all the writings come out of our heart,” he says.

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The platform, which at the moment has 2000 customers from 23 nations, is a whole social network by itself. It has all of the social components together with a timeline, the power to remark, share the content material, and observe one another. That quantity could seem small in dimension for now, however Maity says the Jiya platform is just devoted to writing and nothing else. “It’s all about writing, whatever you are expressing…thinking, whatever you’re feeling, you just come and express it over here,” he explains. Available on Google’s Android platform, the Jiya app is split into six classes and every class is additional subdivided into numerous genres like fiction, non-fiction, emotion, friendship, and so forth. There is a devoted class for poems, tales, letters, articles, standard dialogue and extra. Maity says discovering the content material you have an interest in on the Jiya app has been simplified due to these classes. Even although it’s not been a 12 months for the reason that Jiya app went stay, Maity says the response the platform has been getting from African nations, particularly from Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana, has been distinctive. In reality, Jiya’s third largest consumer base is in Sierra Leone in West Africa. In latest months, Maity has noticed an increase within the variety of customers from the Philippines and Bhutan. According to Maity, the poetry part is moderately in style amongst Jiya customers. The platform, which at the moment has 2000 customers from 23 nations, is a whole social network by itself. While India stays a precedence, Maity believes getting extra customers from outdoors of the nation would give the platform the sting. For now, Maity’s precedence is to make a strong platform that’s interactive in nature. In a brief span of time, the Jiya app boasts of over 6000 posts and whereas that quantity is maintaining greater, Maity is discovering a approach as to how to improve posts per day. Right now, the platform attracts anyplace between 60 to 70 posts in a day. Adding native language help can also be serving to Maity to purchase extra writers. Users can already write in Hindi and Bengali however just lately the platform acquired help for 5 new languages together with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada in addition to Dzongkha, the official language of Bhutan. Asked if there’s a mechanism to reasonable content material that goes on the platform, Maity says: “It’s not possible manually to check all the contents but we do have a report feature so anybody finding any post offensive or if there is any copyright issue they can report to us and we will take the action… If the post is found violating our content guideline, we will delete that post and after two times this thing happens, we will ban the user from the platform.” Since Maity’s workforce consists of solely three folks, he personally connects with writers by WhatsApp teams and encourages them to come to the Jiya platform. “I left my job, and I am running the platform all from my savings,” he mentioned. Born and raised in Kolkata, the 32-years-old calls himself a “Literary Tech Entrepreneur” and desires to flip Jiya into a worldwide social network of literature. But for the reason that platform is younger, Maity says he’s nonetheless testing how far the Jiya app goes. “I target the amateur writers who haven’t published any books so far but they want to showcase their writing skills to other people.”