Building Boraami: The Years of Work Behind ARMY’s New Social Platform

There’s a particular kind of sentence that thrives on the internet: Someone should make this. Everybody agrees. The post gets shared around for a while, and maybe people start imagining what the thing could look like. Then another conversation takes over the timeline, and whatever brilliant idea everyone briefly wanted disappears into the digital void with thousands of others.

But when someone suggested that BTS ARMY should have its own social platform, a group of fans did something much more inconvenient than moving on from the conversation almost as soon as it started: They actually started trying to build one.

The suggestion came during a period when Twitter had become particularly frustrating for parts of the fandom. Fabeha, now Boraami’s cofounder and engineering lead, remembers “the chaos that was there when Elon took over Twitter,” when bugs and complaints about the platform were circulating alongside all the fandom drama already there. “Someone put out an idea to have our own app without the noise of other fandoms, fights, etc.,” she told World Of. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s an amazing idea, and I can actually contribute my skills to bring it to life.’” 

Fabeha remembers the point when the project stopped feeling like one more interesting fandom idea floating around online: “When we formed the Discord server, had team meetings, shared ideas, designs were made, and development started, that was when I did believe that holy cow, this is all real. We really are ARMY working on a safe space for real, and it will come to life if we keep going.” 

What was once a mere idea later went on to become Boraami, a social platform built by ARMY, for ARMY. A team formed around November 2022, began work the following year, and tested a beta version of the app around November 2025. Boraami finally reached app stores on June 15th, 2026. 

I had actually written about Boraami before speaking with the people who built it. In my earlier Bora Society case study, I looked at the amount of infrastructure ARMY has developed around itself over the years: translation teams, chart and streaming resources, educational networks, research projects, databases, volunteer organizations, and other systems that existed because somebody inside the fandom noticed a need and decided to do something about it. 

Boraami stood out to me because it seemed like an escalation of that instinct. ARMY had spent years creating resources on platforms owned by somebody else, then working around whatever changes those platforms made: suspended accounts, shifting algorithms, disappearing features, moderation changes, harassment, misinformation, and the simple fact that a system essential to your community can be altered without your input. 

Boraami represented a different proposition: Rather than make one more specialized account inside someone else’s digital environment, ARMY members would attempt to create the environment themselves. 

That sounded impressive enough when I wrote about it from the outside. Yet talking to Boraami’s team made the sentence “ARMY built its own social platform” feel almost comically inadequate. The three team members who joined the interview made it clear that, more than a platform, they were determined to build a safe, cozy space called home. And doing so required more patience, skill, determination, and obstacle-overcoming than any of them had originally anticipated.

Fabeha was a relatively new, self-taught developer when she joined Boraami. She had learned through online resources and originally signed on as a junior frontend developer, expecting the kind of experience junior developers usually hope for: working under somebody more seasoned, learning through the project, and contributing where she could. However, Boraami couldn’t find enough experienced senior developers willing and able to volunteer consistently, so the role changed underneath her.

“I had to step up first to lead frontend development for the mobile app and eventually handle all the development from backend to frontend.” She describes taking responsibility for the actual product with the limited experience she had as “a huge challenge,” one that came with enough self-doubt that support from the rest of the team became important to getting through it. 

But by the time Boraami launched, Fabeha had gone from joining as a junior frontend developer to becoming a cofounder and engineering lead. “I learned mobile development from scratch [and everything from] deploying on App stores and even registering our company,” she says. “I also gained more experience leading a diverse team toward the same goal, and I improved my soft skills a lot.” 

Learning a new technical discipline is one thing. But learning it while the thing you’re building depends on you figuring it out is another. Boraami became a place where some of the skills needed to finish the app didn’t arrive neatly attached to the people who volunteered; sometimes those people had to learn the work because no one else was around to do it.

Meghana brought much more professional experience in her own field to the project. Originally from India, she’s spent 11 years working in design across corporate environments and startups, and initially joined Boraami as a UX/UI designer, though that role expanded too. She became a cofounder and now describes herself as the lead designer, social media manager, content creator, and a part of “any and all roles that need an owner,” because on a fully volunteer-run team, who handles what can change with people’s capacity and availability.

Chiko brought yet another set of experiences into the project. Her background includes marine engineering, four years of product management, business, consumer behavior, and psychology. She also completed an MBA in Japan while contributing to Boraami and is now a PhD student in social psychology. She originally joined across product and project management, but the team’s size meant she also worked on usability testing, user research, organizational strategy, structure, and even social-media content when necessary. 

Over time, she shifted more firmly toward product management and thinking about how Boraami’s future direction could become something its designers and developers could actually execute. 

What drew Chiko in was not simply the chance to put product-management experience toward a fandom project. She wanted the product herself. When she saw Boraami recruiting, her first reaction was, “I want to have that safe space! I want to have this good side of Twitter. I want to share the love for BTS in a healthy space, because that’s what BTS taught me.” Then came the second thought: “No, I want to be both a user and someone who creates that. I want to be part of that.” Combining her professional background with one of her interests made Boraami, in her words, feel like her “lifetime’s fun side-gig.” 

The three women’s backgrounds are more than impressive, and their willingness to contribute their skills (and learn difficult new ones) just to contribute to a volunteer fan project because they’re that passionate about it is astounding. It also aligns with the pattern I kept noticing while researching Bora Society, only now there are individual people standing in front of it. 

The skills behind fan infrastructure often come from the fans’ lived experience elsewhere, and loving the same artists gives those skills an unexpected place to intersect. In this case, it’s an app which Boraami’s team originally imagined being fairly expansive. 

Fabeha says the vision was to create “a one-stop place for ARMY to meet other ARMY and have everything they would need to stay updated about BTS,” but the team eventually recognized that other fans had already created strong platforms and resources in areas like streaming support. Rather than immediately trying to reproduce everything ARMY had already built, Boraami focused on giving the community a place to interact while still supporting BTS. 

Meghana remembers early meetings as a period where the team “really dreamed big and then broke it down into what is more feasible to build.” However, the bigger ideas have not necessarily disappeared. “Those dreams are still alive,” she reassures. They’d still like to introduce helpful streaming and voting-centered features in the future, and the team remains interested in Boraami eventually becoming closely associated with BTS- and ARMY-centered spaces and conversations.

But before they could even dream of that happening, they knew they had to make an app people could actually use.

That meant figuring out what Boraami should feel like before it had enough users to create its own feeling. Meghana and the design team started by looking at existing social-media platforms and considering what ARMY seemed to be missing. She also points to fans’ nostalgia for BTS’ former Fancafe presence and Vlive, which she remembers as “easier times” for conversations and direct updates from BTS members.

“While we didn’t use these spaces as visual references, we wanted to capture the feeling of home they provided,” Meghana explains. Purple was chosen early, unsurprisingly, but the process went beyond visual signaling. “We also did a lot of usability testing and got feedback from ARMY on the look, feel, and intuitiveness of the app,” she says. “We’re so grateful to the ARMY who tested and gave us all this valuable feedback.” 

Home is a word that appears constantly when Boraami’s team talks about what they’ve been trying to create, but while it sounds soft and almost effortless, the work required to make a social network feel that way is considerably less so. One complication is that you can’t design a comfortable community in Figma; people eventually have to actually enter it. And when they do – no, long before they do – you’re faced with the same uncomfortable questions every other online community is: What can people say? What happens when they disagree? Where does moderation become censorship? Who belongs in the space in the first place? 

ARMY is huge and internationally dispersed, encompassing people with different ages, languages, cultures, political environments, personalities, fandom histories, biases, and ideas about what good fan behavior even looks like. That’s why it was crucial for Boraami to be designed around a shared love of BTS without pretending everybody who loves BTS would automatically get along.

“This has been quite the learning experience, and we’re still learning as we go,” Meghana says of moderation. “Our main principle is to differentiate between moderation and censorship. We want users to express themselves freely without feeling like they’ll be punished for having a different view from someone else.” But of course, a line must be drawn somewhere.

To help keep down certain kinds of disagreements with unwelcome houseguests – such as trolls, antis (haters), and solos (people who support only one person in the group and hate on the rest) – Boraami uses an admission quiz; something Meghana acknowledges is atypical for a social-media platform. The decision came partly from feedback from ARMY and partly from the team’s desire to keep Boraami specifically centered on BTS and the fandom. 

“When users open Boraami,” she continues, “we want them to feel like they’ve come home and can put their bags down and just relax with friends without worrying about fan wars, hate, antis, etc.” 

That may be the easiest way to understand the project’s central contradiction. A home is supposed to feel easy to the person coming inside, but building one is hard work, and maintaining one may be even harder, especially as the community inside it grows larger and larger. Behind that imagined moment of an exhausted fan metaphorically dropping their bag at the door are decisions about moderation, user research, software architecture, team management, community expectations, and the thousand less interesting things that make a pleasant user experience possible.

And to add to the already difficult work, even the team itself had to be built while the app was being built.

Meghana laughs about how often some variation of “we figured it out along the way” comes up when describing Boraami, but it really is one of the project’s defining realities. They began with designers and a few developers. Then they realized building and launching a social network also required project management, marketing, social media, community management, organization, and whatever else came next.

“When we started the project, we had a very romanticized idea of how it would be to build a social media app for ARMY, and how cool it would be to have BTS join the app one day,” Meghana says, adding, “a girl can dream.” What became harder was learning how to work across different personalities, cultures, expectations, and working styles within a global volunteer team. “We were lucky to have great team members join us as we went, but we also lost a lot of team members for various reasons.” She doesn’t talk about those departures as though the people who left failed the project. “Despite everything, we put Boraami out in the world,” she says, “and at the end of the day, my thought is that every single person that was on the team at every point in time was important in any role they played.” 

Fabeha is similarly frank about what a long-running volunteer project asks of people. “I feel people don’t realize how hard it is to work on such a big project when volunteers have different availability and commitment levels,” she says. “It actually takes a lot of mental strength to keep working on a project for a long period of time, where people do leave the team due to personal life commitments, etc., so we got so small as a team at some point that it was hard to keep going and believing we could make it work.” 

That sentence gets at a weakness built into so much fan-created infrastructure. Independence is part of what makes it possible in the first place – nobody needed a corporate executive to decide ARMY deserved a new social platform before the team could start imagining one. But the work isn’t a compensated, full-time job that those who decide to do it can focus on entirely. It exists within the margins of people’s actual lives. 

Volunteers have jobs, classes, families, illnesses, moves, burnout, financial responsibilities, and ordinary weeks when they simply cannot give as much to the thing they care about as they once could.

Chiko says the team keeps asking itself what “the best suitable and healthy working process” is for whoever currently makes up Boraami. That answer has had to change as the team’s size and dynamics changed. People are spread across different countries and time zones, and everyone has another primary job or activity in their life. For Chiko, the lesson has involved “how to listen, understand, adjust, and empathize with others” while still maintaining enough clarity and direction that the project does not disappear into endless flexibility.

The timeline reflects that difficulty. Boraami was expected earlier than it arrived. Fabeha says development took longer largely because of the shortage of developers with the experience and availability the project needed, and that extended timeline affected morale.

“For a long time, the app was in development,” she says, “and I tried to learn and do many things, like leading the other developers, but I think other team members lost the drive they had in the early days of Boraami, which is understandable.” The lesson she took from it is less about forcing people to remain committed forever than accepting that “people who choose the same path may divert at some point due to different goals or just life priorities.”

The fact that Boraami eventually launched starts to feel different once that history is visible. The polished version of the story could be written as a clean timeline from tweet to team to beta to app stores. The actual timeline includes people arriving and leaving, roles expanding, new disciplines learned under pressure, periods of self-doubt, and a shrinking team trying to hold onto enough belief in the original idea to keep moving.

Then, after years of all that, the app was finally launched, and people showed up.

A lot of them.

“The love and support we got when we announced that we were building this blew us away,” Meghana says. The team knew there was demand for an ARMY-centered social space, but “we didn’t quite realize how much it would mean to the community to actually have that built out.” Boraami received more than 1,000 applications within 24 hours of launch – enough that the team temporarily paused applications just so its small number of volunteers could catch up on reviewing them. “We were scrambling,” she admits, but after launching later than intended, she was also relieved to find that ARMY was still waiting. 

The launch changed what Boraami could give back to the people who had spent years trying to finish it. Before users arrived, the team could only imagine the community that might someday exist there. Now the Boraline – Boraami’s feed and timeline – contains actual people talking about their days, posting about BTS, offering ideas for the platform, sharing happy moments, and sometimes showing up with the difficult parts of their lives too.

“Boraami users! They are the ones who keep me here,” Chiko says. “I often cried (for real) when I saw Boraami users sharing their sunset photos, their happy and even sad moments. People are genuinely cheering them on or comforting them through replies, and everyone is so sweet and supportive.” 

One interaction has apparently lodged itself particularly firmly in her memory: a user asked whether clearing notifications might make it easier for Boraami’s team to manage the database.

“I feel touched by these moments,” Chiko says. “I screenshot all of these, put them in a folder, and it instantly makes me say, ‘I want to protect all these people. I want them to still have this much love. I want them to enjoy their hobby in a healthy way. So we can, together, share our love for BTS healthily.’ That’s my motivation.” 

Meghana describes a similar ritual happening collectively. “There are certainly times when I, as an individual, and we as a team question if what we are doing and all the challenges we face are really making any impact on anyone,” she says. Then somebody posts that Boraami “feels so nice” or “feels like home,” and the team shares those comments in its Discord server. “Even on our worst days, we find energy to keep going because this is exactly what all this is for.” 

Her next sentence is also probably the most charmingly ARMY-specific product mission statement I’ve encountered: “We want Boraami to be the vitamin to ARMY, like Hobi is to Yoongi!” 

Fabeha’s relationship with the project is similarly personal, having been there from near the beginning. “Boraami is like a baby to me,” she says. There have been periods when she was burned out or dealing with difficulties in her own life, but she credits her ability to keep going partly to the comfort she gets from BTS and partly to what she’s learned from ARMY about persistence. Now, some of her most meaningful moments come when she opens her Boraline and sees fans sharing their days, talking about Bangtan, or offering suggestions while saying how happy they are the space exists. 

The community was always part of the plan, obviously. What the team could not completely manufacture was what that community would feel like once it existed.

Chiko’s own relationship to Boraami now offers one answer. “Every time I open my Boraami app now, I really feel the nostalgia of the internet back then [a few decade or so ago],” she said in the original interview, describing it as a comforting place she looks forward to visiting at the end of the day to talk with long-distance friends, ramble about things they like, complain about the struggle of her PhD, and then go to sleep without demanding notifications or the constant fear that somebody is about to turn her words into a fight. “As an ARMY, I genuinely do not want to lose this home,” she says. “And as a Product Manager, I always dream that more people like me feel comforted here.”

That answer is useful because it makes Boraami’s ambition less abstract. “Healthy fandom space” can become the kind of phrase that sounds nice without telling you much. Chiko is describing something more mundane and therefore more convincing: opening an app after a long day because your friends are there and you feel like talking.

When asked what she wanted users to feel the first time they opened Boraami, she offered two comparisons. One being the relief of finally getting home after a very long day, throwing down your bag, taking off your shoes and socks, grabbing a towel, and sinking into warm water. The other reaches further back: coming home from school as a child, turning on the family computer, waiting for dial-up internet, then opening Yahoo Messenger and Friendster because a long-distance friend was waiting somewhere on the other side. 

There is no metric for that.

But there are metrics for downloads, active users, retention, application numbers, and whatever else Boraami eventually decides it needs to measure. The team certainly has growth ambitions. Meghana hopes the platform can eventually do more to guide new ARMY, carry fandom knowledge between fans, highlight streaming and voting initiatives, and help people plan fan projects. Fabeha wants Boraami to become “the first stop” fans think of for BTS, concerts, ARMY projects, finding friends, and supporting the group. 

Those plans pull Boraami even closer to the wider ecosystem I wrote about in Bora Society. A social space could eventually become a place where some of ARMY’s existing infrastructure meets: new fans learning from experienced ones, information moving through the community, people organizing projects, fans finding one another around shared goals – the key difference is that the platform itself was built with that fandom as the intended population rather than asking ARMY to adapt yet another general-purpose service around its needs.

Still, Boraami’s definition of success becomes much more interesting when the numbers are deliberately removed from the question.

Fabeha says she will feel the platform has succeeded when Boraami becomes “a normal name in our fandom,” somewhere associated with peace, supporting BTS, finding other ARMY, and helping baby ARMY learn. 

Chiko gets even more specific.

“When baby ARMY just joined, and they are confused about things, their first thought is ‘Ah, Boraami! I can ask there, and no one will judge me,’” she says. Or maybe an ARMY sees “a beautiful sunset” or leaves a concert feeling happy and immediately thinks, “Ah, I wanna share this in Boraami; they must be so happy to see this with me.” She compares it to taking a picture of good food or something you saw on a trip and sending it to your family group chat because, naturally, those are the people you want to show. Success, in her version, is when Boraami becomes ARMY’s “big family group chat, where they are most comfortable.” 

I keep coming back to the sunset.

There is something wonderfully disproportionate about everything required to make that particular moment possible. 

People spent years doing what seemed to be a never-ending to-do list worth of tasks – writing code, learning mobile development, testing interfaces, figuring out moderation, navigating volunteer turnover, restructuring teams, coordinating across time zones, learning jobs they did not originally sign up to do, and wondering whether the project would ever actually launch – and all for one tiny, possible result, which many of the team members dreamed of: somebody sees a beautiful sky and knows where they want to post the picture. Right on the Boraline, for all others who call Boraami “home” to see.

When I first wrote about Boraami, I saw it as the latest evidence of how far ARMY’s organizing instinct had developed. Fans had built translation systems, voting networks, educational resources, databases, hundreds of charitable projects, and plenty of other forms of support. Building a social platform seemed like just another remarkable entry on the list. But talking to the team made the list feel almost insufficient. 

“ARMY built this” can hide almost as much as it reveals.

There are people under the collective noun. They have specific skills and gaps in those skills. They get tired. Some leave. Others unexpectedly find themselves responsible for much more than they planned. They have to work through different personalities and cultural expectations. 

But the work feels worth it to them due to their shared love of their idols and their passion for creating better spaces for their fellow fandom members.

And in many cases, they get excited by the simplest outcomes of their contributions – like when strangers finally use the thing they spent years of their lives discussing in private to post a simple update, a thoughtful opinion, or a beautiful photo of a shared sunset.

Boraami’s team set out to create a place that could feel like home for ARMY. Meghana has said that something slightly different happened once fans started arriving: the users themselves made it warmer than the team ever could have done alone. The team could build the house, but eventually people had to move in.

Now that the app has officially launched, they are.

And if you happen to be an ARMY reading this, you can, too! The Boraami app is out now, available on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

Find Boraami’s interview with World Of here.