Udala | African Social and Creator Platform

Gallery

About

Udala is an adult-content and linkup marketplace: creators publish posts, go live, and sell locked/tiered subscription content and bookable services; explorers discover, subscribe, tip, and message. It's built on Next.js 14 (App Router, TypeScript) with Prisma over Postgres (Neon), Tailwind, NextAuth (Google/X), Cloudinary for media, and ships as an installable PWA.What makes it technically interesting is that most of the "discovery" surface — Feed, Discover, Live, Services, Search — runs on a shared, from-scratch ranking engine rather than reverse-chronological lists.It's a four-stage pipeline: SQL-level eligibility filtering (blocked/suspended/incognito/already-seen), bounded multi-source candidate retrieval, in-memory scoring, and slate assembly. Scoring splits into a cron-computed, Bayesian-smoothed post-quality prior (shrunk toward a platform-wide rate at low sample sizes, with a velocity multiplier and trust weighting) and a cheap per-request term blending viewer creator affinity, topic overlap, and recency decay.Composition — not just score — is enforced explicitly: creator exposure caps per session, a guaranteed exploration quota, and a locked-content quota gated to viewers with existing affinity, so the feed can't collapse into either an all-locked wall or a single creator's content. Everything degrades gracefully to chronological for a signal-less new account, and a fixed holdout cohort always sees the unranked baseline for measurement.Other pieces worth a look: a unified Postgres search (pg_trgm + unaccent, one ranked query across people/posts/hashtags/services), a topic taxonomy layered over free-form hashtags to make affinity learnable despite sparse tags, and an image pipeline that normalizes HEIC/AVIF/oversized uploads client-side with a Cloudinary server-side fallback so uploads never fail on format.Looking for a co-founder to help with marketing efforts.