Aesa Mental Health

Removing barriers to men's mental health and communication, one message at a time. Aesa is a place for guys to motivate each other with those hard-hitting quotes.

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Aesa: Redefining Male Motivation

Inspiration

Aesa was born when we noticed a significant gap in the way guys motivate each other. We saw a lack of motivation and a false negative connotation attached to male-to-male camaraderie, especially online. On various social media platforms and the internet, we often witness this disparity. One glaring example is how comments on posts differ between genders. While girls are typically able to leave countless positive comments on their friends' posts, guys' posts are met with a negative response to success or, more often, no comments at all, even from their friends. The environment just isn't conducive for men to openly express and receive motivation without fear of judgment.

Our Mission

Aesa's mission is encapsulated in our tagline: "Removing barriers to men's mental health and communication, one message at a time." We aim to create a virtual social bubble where guys can motivate each other safely and effectively with hard-hitting quotes. By offering a platform that promotes positive camaraderie and motivation, we want to destigmatize the idea of guys uplifting each other.

What We've Learned

Throughout our journey, we've learned the importance of the right virtual environment and of seeing all sides of a situation. The challenges men face in expressing their feelings and motivating each other are real. Our project has emphasized the significance of building a safe space where men can connect and share their thoughts. Additionally, on the technical side, we have also learned a fair amount about Tailwind CSS, Svelte, Astro, and building full-stack web applications.

Building Aesa

Firstly, we came up with the idea for the project and got a team together. We then chose what kind of software it would be (web app) and what vanilla languages it would run on for the frontend (HTML, CSS, and JS). Once the frontend was built in vanilla languages, we decided to speed up our site and improve the interactive components by converting to a better framework. After running into issues with Svelte, we finally chose Astro. During this conversion from vanilla, we decided to replace the original upvote button with a better Reddit-like upvote and downvote system and to sort posts by most likes to create a community-moderated system. We also employed Tailwind CSS to transfer style elements and create our animated background. In the worst-case scenario, admins also retain the ability to remove harmful posts and/or try and ban devices from using the site. As the frontend was being built, we also set up the backend with Rust and Shuttle to avoid having to write infrastructure files and streamline the process of building and shipping the backend. In the end, we put everything together, hosted the site, and Aesa was ready for users.

Challenges

The main challenges we faced were converting from vanilla to an improved framework and attempting to make our site as unoffensive as possible to potential audiences, considering the nature of "cancel culture" in this day and age. To solve the former, we researched and learned about Tailwind CSS, then got on group calls and collaborated in order to complete the conversion. We found Svelte to be incompatible with certain aspects of our site, such as our particles and alignment, so after converting to Svelte, we decided to go back and convert to Astro instead. To solve the latter, we have placed emphasis on the positivity of the content our site is aimed to promote and have added a vote-based community moderation system to bury and eventually delete negative content.

In summary, Aesa is more than just a website; it's a movement to redefine how men motivate each other. It's a place where guys can connect, motivate, and uplift each other. We are proud to be a part of this journey, promoting mental health and positive camaraderie among men, one post at a time.

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