Stories are more than written words: ngano is now your.abuna.app

Before anyone wrote a story down, someone told it. A voice in the evening, a pause just long enough for the listeners to lean in, a laugh that tells you the ending is close. Half of a story lives in the way it is told.

We built ngano for the other half, the written one. It was a place where people in Cameroon could write stories and be read, and they did. Some stories ran for nine chapters, and readers came back for every one.

The longer we ran it, the smaller the page felt. A poem wants to be read aloud. A lesson is easier to follow when you can see it done. Some things take three paragraphs to write and ten seconds to show. And anyone who publishes every week ends up asking the same question: could this pay me? We kept coming back to one thought. Stories are more than written words. They are audio, they are video, and they are the people who gather around them.

So ngano grows into your.abuna.app. Every creator gets their own page, and on it the written word is only where things start. You can publish posts that are free for everyone or kept for members, build a course with lessons in order, put a video or an audio inside any post, or record a voice note right in the editor. Here is what you can upload. Podcasts are next, and coming soon.

We thought about community the same way. A story gathers people, and those people want somewhere to talk, to each other and to the one telling it. That is why we built on Telegram. Many communities here already live there, so we didn't ask anyone to move. A creator connects their private group or channel, and each member gets a button to join it. When a membership ends, they leave, and every new post shows up in the group on its own. The help page explains how the Telegram connection works.

Then there's the question of being paid. A creator can set a monthly price, from 100 FCFA, or keep the page free. Readers who join pay with MTN Mobile Money or Orange Money, and earnings come back the same way. Read how payouts work and what the fees are. The creator decides which posts are for members and which stay open to everyone, and Studio shows the followers, the members and what has been earned, so you can see a page grow.

The rest we tried to keep out of the way. You sign in with your email and a 6-digit code, with no password to remember, or with Google. The whole site works in English and French. Creators who want more can take Pro, which puts the page on their own domain, like yourname.com, with their own colour and a pinned post, and lets one account run up to five pages.

Nobody who was on ngano has to start over. Accounts moved, and every writer's stories are on a page with their name, free to read, like the ones from Emma and Ms P. We moved them under one rule: nothing that was private on ngano became public. Stories that were anonymous, unpublished or marked as adult content are drafts that only their writer can see, and the writer decides whether they go live. A story with chapters is now one post per chapter, each pointing back to the one before it. Reading scores, edit history and old comments stayed behind. If something looks wrong, write to malico@abuna.app or look through the help pages.

Making a page is free. Start yours on your.abuna.app, or see who is already telling stories there.

A story told well still makes people lean in. Now the people telling it can be read, heard, seen, and paid, with their listeners gathered close.