By Damola Omole

Fable Social, founded in 2020, is a hub platform aimed at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) students. It offers a newsletter that compiles campus events while also serving as a space to socialize and find jobs.

The newsletter intended for TMU is the latest addition to the hub was announced on Sept.14 in the TorontoMetU reddit forum. The creator of Fable Social, Daesol Jung, said the feature took about 29 hours to build, describing the process as “painstaking.”

The University of Toronto (U of T) alum described how as an undergraduate, he and his friend were struggling to find club and event information at their university, and would only find out about these events after they had already happened. This inspired them post-grad to create a tool to spare other students from that same experience.

“We were like, ‘Oh, I wish there was a platform where we can find event information in one place,’ rather than finding it on Instagram, Discord, Facebook groups or all across the campus,” said Jung.

From there, Jung would go on to start Fable Social, which he describes as “a central social platform where [you] can find university information, job opportunities or university-related job opportunities.”

Similar to Discord, there’s also an anonymous forum where students can discuss and share information.

“We just wanted to centralize the fragmented information into one place, so users can benefit from [it].”

While Fable Social isn’t quite ready for students yet, Jung says that the social system has been fully built. Once registration becomes open, “TMU students will be able to use it right away.”

Jung also noted that over 1,000 students have already signed up to use the app once it’s released.

Among those students is Maya Zakaria, a fourth-year business management student at TMU.

“It’s a really good idea. I think it’s going to help students connect with each other,” Zakaria said.

“A lot of events have a low turnout rate, simply [because] there isn’t enough awareness about [them],” she added. “So I think this app [will help] increase the turnout of events at TMU as well.”

Not every student was as optimistic as Zakaria. Second-year philosophy student Conor Hassaram-Leblanc expressed that he initially joined the waitlist via email to use the app and received a few email updates as well. But after learning that it utilizes data scraping to obtain information, he said he was turned off.

“I just think that if they were buying the data, or if they were having students input their data into the platform itself…that would be a bit better,” Hassaram-Leblanc said.

Data scraping, as the name suggests, involves extracting large chunks of information from around the internet and organizing it into a structured format like a spreadsheet or database.

It’s often used for market research, e-commerce, and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI) training. With the emergence of various AI systems that utilize data scraping to its fullest extent, the ethics of scraping have been thrust into public discourse. Massive scraping operations, such as AI learning models, typically collect data on individuals without their consent.

In response to these concerns, Jung said while Fable Social does rely on data scrapping, only “publicly available information and posts” are used and direct references to the original sources are always cited in the newsletters. 

“Our goal is to enhance student access to events with full transparency,” said Jung.

Hassaram-Leblanc also mentioned there are alternative platforms that he’d prefer to utilize instead of Fable Social, such as ExploreTMU, a TMU-owned website where students can track academic events happening on campus.

However, Jung thinks his app has the potential to be much more.

“[It’s] not [just] an event directory, but a university social hub. It’s not just a place where you find events, but this is where you make your university social life fruitful.”

Past apps like Ryerson Mobile and RU Mine also aimed to simplify and revolutionize various aspects of life on campus, as previously reported by The Eye. The former had a list of issues that caused it to lose favour in the eyes of students, while the latter fizzled out two years after its creation due to a rapid decline in users as well as a creator who sought other ventures. 

Historically, it doesn’t seem to bode well for TMU-based apps. Despite this track record, Jung remains hopeful in his own. 

“We’ve seen quite a handful of similar apps that come and go. And I think one big differentiator is trust, brand trust,” he said. “Compared to other new startups or other companies that have done it, they’ve done it for about a month or two months, and they disappear, but [we’ll] stick [around] for a long time.”

Jung said TMU students can expect to have full access to the app just in time for the new semester in January.