The more I see of social media, the more I'm convinced that it's not really a fulfilling way to share and socialize on the internet. I've come to believe that anything that can platform every voice on the planet forces noise to drown out signal.
Since you've actually started a social media site, I wonder if you have any insight on that? You say you believe in this project; what is it that you think is valuable about letting everyone talk to everyone, as opposed to exclusive and curated spaces for people that semi-self-select based on community interests and values, like forums? Separately, why do you think that removing organizations/brands and psuedo users is going to be the crux of the solution?
Honestly looking to have my mind changed. But mostly just curious.
> The more I see of social media, the more I'm convinced that it's not really a fulfilling way to share and socialize on the internet.
I kinda miss the "old" social media, where it was media and also social... you would open whatever (facebook, myspace, instagram...) and you'd see your friends, plates of what they're eating, some attention seeking statuses, wedding photos, invites to birthdays, etc.
I have no idea if people stopped posting all that or if algorithm hid all that content behind random content it wanted to push instead, so you get zero of that but a lot of random news stories, "reels" and random videos from influences you don't follow and are not interested in, and basically a lot of not-social stuff. I know there's more money for the social network if they show me artificially protracted diy wideos and "you won't believe..." crap, but that made me leave one "social" network after another.
I think the whole influencer trend ruined it. You literally gave people an incentive to be as loud as possible so they can make as much money as possible. Where is the incentive to connect?
Also, Social media sold us the idea that hey you can stay in touch with everyone! But in reality, what is gave people was a new form of communication in broadcasting. In real life, you always directly interact with people or groups of people but the primary way you communicate in social media is basicslly shout into the void via status updates, stories, images etc. Its became about who you are, not a way to connect to people.
I really never bought or still buy the idea that you need social media to stay connected to your friends. I haven't used it in a decade and i still have friends who i interact with via messaging apps etc. I have never missed social media and realize most things people post have 0 relevance to my life so why am i spending my precious time going through this shit and making zuck and silly influencers money for free?
Sure, i might want to follow an influencer or two and look at their videos, but I want my "feed" to be "social", so people i choose to follow, be it real life friends, or even influencers, but not "random" content from sources I don't follow.
I have a lot of friends who have moved abroad, changed jobs, had kids, etc., and social networks gave me all that info, plus I could contact them in a "lighter" way than taking the phone and calling them, plus you could make groups of people (classmates, coworkers from previous job, etc.). There were also a lot of "we're at <local bar>, if anyone wants to join us" posts back in the time, and since i lived 5 minutes away, I joined or even posted that status if I was one of the first people there, and other came... now it's hours of coordination just to meet for a beer.
Basically, it was easier to reach people who are "not that close" to you that you would directly call them, and you find out stuff (who moved where, who has a kid now, etc.). Now I don't know any of that, but I get served a fake video of someone inserting a battery into the antenna connector of a tv.
From my personal point of view (because this is subjective of course) but like there was never any point of caring about any of those people to me. It just wasn't a good enough use of my time and the algorithims are literally desinged to make me addicted and suck away my attention. I couldn't care less if Ben who i met at work 10 years ago and havent spoken to in over 7 is having a kid or moved to Spain or whatever. I made a consious choice to step away from that and really care what I was doing with my attention which again imo has lead to better results and not a lot of social degradation (i dont think my irl social life would be different if i was on social media)
100% agree with this. The whole "influencer" industry (let's be honest it's about manipulating you) is peak enshitification.
I quit twitter cos it became a cesspool. IG needs aggressive curation and keeping notifications off. Even bluesky became rage bait. And only watch a few channels of YouTube thru FreeTube.
Maybe I just old grumpy geek but after nearly 2 decades of social media I've yet to find the "social" part. It is in the main a bucket into which anyone can vomit their media and hysteria du jour.
It was a good experiment but it's done.
Pieces has promise if they can come up with a curation process that matches the ideals of their platform. I truly hope it works out because part of me wants there to be a place online for people to share publicly without fear of doxing or advertising.
Hey, sorry for getting back to you late. Was watching a bunch of World Cup games.
I'll say this: when you log into one of the incumbent social networks like IG/X/SnapChat/Facebook and you see a post that you don't care at all to see, why are you seeing that? It's because they want you to see it. They think that this post with this content and these reactions has the highest chance of making you engage with it and see more ads. The best example of this is navigating reddit.com vs old.reddit.com. The fancier reddit.com always recommends me stuff that I don't really care about but end up clicking through on because I am weak and they know I am weak. old.reddit.com is closer to the old internet that I enjoy: I check in on topics/subreddits I'm interested in and then when nothing is new or interesting, I do other things.
Arguably, building a platform that's less addictive is foolish and leaving money on the table. But as someone who had to quit IG for 2 years (though I'm back on it now) I really don't want to sell people a digital drug addiction. I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career?
To answer your question more directly, the internet has given me a lot. One of the reasons I'm so into soccer/football is because following the /r/soccer subreddit taught me about the sport and after browsing on/off for a couple of years I can tell you all the big storylines. I never in a million years would've been a football fan if it weren't for the subreddit. I've picked up hobbies like shuffling to house music by following various shufflers on IG. I keep in touch with friends from middle school who, if I grew up in earlier decades, I would've lost contact with a long, long time ago. All because of social media.
The internet can be a great place when the platforms themselves allow us to control our attention. I'm optimistic about PIECES and the other platforms we're building. I want people to feel connected to other people. Is there anything more important than that?
> I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career
Just a tip that helped me here: I'd recommend going through a pretty significant Unsubscribe purge with those channels. I think its something that I ended up doing due to the pandemic, but I realized I was following too many "daily update" channels that just flooded my attention while the clickbait. I started by removing some of the more egregious channels and then when I'd pop into some of the more well known channels with longer "weekly updates", I realized they also would also do the same thing.
I'm still aware of news, but I'm no longer glued to the hour by hour coverage and remember to actually do and watch the things I see. I'm going to be sleeving some Magic cards later today.
lol yeah. I used YouTube as an example based on what I see people responding to. My actual YouTube feed is pretty good since I use the Unhook chrome extension and almost exclusively watch YouTube on my TV.
I think forums were, and are still largely the solution to the social issue, as you very well describe them... That's why there are still a few out there that thrive in their niches.
The problem is that way back when, circa 2005, all these places were kind nerd, and at that point in time being a nerd was still not something to be proud of, so for most people "the internet" was MSN and Fotolog, and today's internet for most of this cohort is still just an evolution of that stuff (Whatsapp and Facebook), and the newer generation didnt even get to know what the forum-scene was...
So anything people produce today, is either a replacement for nerd forums, which does not need replacement, or the social media that as crappy as it is, just works... The only new social media that is thriving is copies of other platforms that have become too much of an echo chamber to bare, so now we need another echo chamber but one for the other 50%.
I think that's why we see so many riffs on social media, people trying to make a breakthrough on things like, decentralized, more secure, less moderated, more moderated, crypto, paid, X-only, etc
And the reality is that nobody that is hooked, or cares about social media gives a shit about any of that, they want the feed, the masses want what they already have, and everybody else is just looking to be the next vBulletin watercooler reinvention.
Paradoxically, what social media is quite good at is forum discovery.
Facebook overall is a pox on humanity. Private Facebook groups, however, can be genuinely useful. I spend a lot of time in one topic-specific Facebook group (and as little time on wider Facebook as I can manage)
A “social contract” that one party changes at will and then just announces the changes is not a contract (or social) in any meaningful sense. It’s just terms and conditions with a different name.
If you want people to see it as a different thing, it needs to be a different thing.
While I understand what you're saying, what's the alternative? For an early platform to come out and say, "this is exactly how we're going to operate until the end of time and if we change our minds we'll... dissolve ourselves?"
IMO The Social Contract that we publish is a step in the right direction. If you're on IG and you look at your feed in 2018 vs 2026, you can tell that something has changed dramatically but there is nothing in writing about what IG promised in 2018 vs what they do in 2026. It's all by feel. If they published it, IG users would be able to point out every promise kept and broken.
In the future, perhaps members can sign contracts like sports stars who agree with their club to have ABC terms for XYZ years. But this is where we're starting and I'm happy to get feedback from our members on how to better assure them in future versions of The Social Contract.
I agree, but since you will have to change it, I'm just saying it's not a contract if it changes from one side.
So, e.g.:
- make it more quasi-contractually binding on yourself, in some principled, innovative way: establish a member user group, consult with them before changing it and give them the freedom to publish the minutes of the meeting, or establish some other meaningful cost of changing it
- or just call it "What we mean when we say 'social network'" or something, otherwise it's about as good as "Don't Be Evil".
> Myspace is a favela. You've ever been to a Brazilian favela? It basically, politically, represents the structure of Myspace. You've got this remote, distant, old-school Brazilian tyrant. Anti-democratic, wicked mogul, pays no attention to you, supposedly owns the whole show, but the whole shebang is going south in a hurry.
> You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can't go anywhere in Myspace, you can't organize in Myspace, you can't make money in Myspace.
> You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That's a favela. It's made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it's made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks.
> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!
> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum.
- i see a 100 social networks advertised daily on reddit, HN etc
- the biggest challenge you are facing is overcoming the double network effect
- in order for any of em to take off, you need to get me and my friends and their friends and so on
- one way to do this is to start a social network only for a small niche. could be anything. startups only! designers only etc and scale it up one category at a time to let the network effects come into the picture
- that is how you build a social media with 1M+ users
I actually strongly disagree with this. This is how many social media sites have failed.
I don't know if alternative social media can ever scale as large as Reddit. Tildes.net and Lemmy both have similar activity to Hacker News and I'd consider them both "successful."
The truth is that Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc are not websites used to drive connections between human beings; they're media machines meant to create ad distribution channels. And that's what users want.
When someone uses Instagram, they don't want to see their friends vacation photos - they want to see Cardi Bs latest post. Meta attaches ads to that interaction and that's how they drive revenue.
When someone uses Reddit, they aren't seeing what their neighbor has to say - they're consuming a long flowing rage bait story or a web comic. Sure, there are smaller, niche communities but that isn't the bulk of the site traffic.
And, honestly, content is addictive. I'm personally not on Reddit to make friends or deepen my connection with other humans. I'm there to scroll through memes and cat pictures.
I think that smaller social media sites fail because they don't emphasize media generation and distribution. That reframing still presents difficult problems to solve but I feel like that simple perspective pivot helps with growth. Like, if you wanted to take the "OG" Reddit approach to bootstrapping a social media site you could just programatically generate massive amounts of fake content. Rage bait stories, product placement, etc. Just firehose as much media to drive engagement until you get actual human beings to take part.
That is is growth is what you want. It's arguable whether hyperscaled social media platforms actually make society better or individuals happier.
I think "want" is a strong word here. The way I have been explaining this to my friends is that back in the day, you had a phone to call your friends and a TV to find out the news. But what if your phone was your TV and your TV was your phone? This is what present day social media is.
I think most social media/networks now are terrible for keeping in touch with people we want to hear from. I was listening to a podcast with the musician Zedd and he mentioned that in the golden days of Facebook, he could post that he was doing a show in Toronto (or any city) and every person in Toronto who followed the Zedd Facebook page would come see him. Nowadays. he could do a post about being in Toronto and his Toronto fans will be like, "wait, why didn't I know you were in Toronto? I totally would've gone!"
Ironically, I've been enjoying IG now because I have PIECES as my place to share memories. I went to Coachella and magically IG started recommending me a ton of cool Coachella content. I open my IG now and it's a ton of World Cup content. Last month it was all Knicks content. Yet when I posted about PIECES on my Facebook, neither my aunts, uncles, or cousins saw that their family member created something he was proud of. I reached out by DM to tell them about it.
This is what happens when social platforms get to use ad revenue to fund their moon shots. All they have to do is turn on more ads to get the needed capital to fund their AI and -verse bets. As another user pointed out, The Social Contract we published isn't foolproof as a basis to assure our members that PIECES will be any different than incumbent social networks. But it's certainly a start.
Yeah, I apologize for how restrictive "want" is - I'm not sure what the appropriate word is in this context. It's more that content engagement is what drives web traffic regardless of whether or not users express desire for human connection. The social part of social media doesn't drive website expansion - content does. We love it. Yum, yum, yum.
I think if you sit a lot of people down and ask them "would you rather have cat videos or the potential to meet new friends (or maintain connections with old ones)" and people will say the want the latter but reward platforms that give them the former.
Old Facebook was maybe closer to the ideal of connecting people but Meta realized that it just doesn't drive ad revenue or engagement so they refactored it to better suit ad delivery streams and put more effort into Instagram (because it's better suited for that type of revenue model).
It's pretty late tonight and thankfully HN has re-front paged this to my surprise so I'll just talk openly.
The playbook that you lay out is basically the playbook every social network has come up with... and where are we now in 2026? Has that playbook produced anything good?
The niche social networks don't work and will never grow beyond their niches. Everyone is trying to start the niche thing, but ultimately, photographers want to be around non-photographers, animators want to be around non-animators, etc.,. Historically this was solved by people being on the incumbent platforms like IG/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, with niche networks to fill those specialized needs in. But I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks and there will be a vacuum with new platforms vying to fill the space. These new platforms will have their own takes on what makes a good social network. PIECES is me throwing in my hat.
I built PIECES first and foremost for myself. I had a xanga that I loved, multiple tumblrs that I still reference, an insta to talk to my friends, finstas that I still sometimes lurk on, a Substack, and a Twitter that I just re-started posting in, but at this point nothing really compares to PIECES. The most analogous is tumblr but that too became a niche platform that has been abandoned. PIECES has been great for me because it's a place I can express myself without getting caught in some other company's algo while also being able to share exclusively with my friends.
I can write more but I'll finish with this. It's July 2026 and I declare that PIECES is here to stay. There is no world where I write on the home page, "Hey everyone, it's with a heavy heart that I have to tell everyone that PIECES is closing..." I've been on the internet for 28 years now. PIECES is good. It's going to be slow growth because I refuse to build in any type of addictive/gamified functionality or make false promises or w/e but as the exodus away from incumbent social media takes place, PIECES will be one of the platforms there that promises something different.
But we'll see and I'll return back to this post in July 2030. I don't think I'll be eating my words though.
> I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks
Are you willing to change your mind on this?
What evidence do you have this will happen?
It does seem that social networks can have some generational stickiness. Wrestling my family away from Facebook feels like a lost cause. But younger relatives are more active on Instagram and some other options.
But I don't see what would trigger an exodus given that everything you and I might not like about the existing social media incumbents hasn't been enough to drive people away en masse so far.
You gotta take risks sometimes. The opportunity cost of me working on this vs other projects is my risk.
To be more precise about what I mean by exodus, I don't think that instagram is going away but I do think its utility as the de facto social network to keep in touch with friends is at risk. I know a lot of people who are quitting and I know a lot of people who don't really care for it but are on it because everyone else is on it. I'll probably have an IG still in 5 years but I see a world where I don't use it much.
I get it, but form follows finance — show me how piecesof.me sustains itself and I'll tell you what kind of promises they can actually make. Lots of naive optimism out there with these types of projects.
I like the idea at a social level/product level, but at this point I don't think I'd use any social network that wasn't open at a protocol level in some way. ATProto/etc would be a great tech backbone for this, and would then let users self host their content, it would let orgs run their own views, it would let archivers archive content for posterity, it would open the door to possible federation in ways that suited the network in the future. Re-inventing all of that from scratch would be a terrible idea, and would lose focus.
I THINK I fixed it... should be up in 10 minutes. The reason: the try.piecesof.me flow creates a profile in a sort of exists-but-also-doesnt-exists state. Made a change so that the doc is viewable in that middle state. But anyone who claimed it, before and now, would've been able to see the doc.
Thanks for trying it out though and I hope to see you on the platform.
Do you have any plans to support Ultra HDR images, on the Android app and/or other platforms? I did some browsing of the site and didn't see any examples (but that doesn't mean it's unsupported).
I actually had to look this up. Currently we don't but apparently we could support it if you upload via the web. Our mobile apps use Expo and the native image picker re-encodes the image.
If you're interested still despite limitations (Ultra HDR Images also won't be seen by many people) I can look into this more.
Thanks for taking a look! I haven't used Expo, but looking at the docs I wonder if using 'allowEditing: false' and 'exif: true' in the ImagePickerOptions would bypass reencoding? The gainmap is stored in the EXIF data. Instagram is similar in that the gainmap is stripped if you edit the image at all, cropping included, but if no crops or filters are done then the image retains the gainmap.
Either way if the clients are able to render the HDR images, I think uploading on web is still a usable implementation.
I just did some more research and we probably won't do the work until there's more demand. We can actually easily support it on desktop (we upload the raw bytes but always default to serving a compressed version, which I can override for HDR) but for mobile there's no drop-in solution for Expo apps and thus would have to build 4 new things (iOS and Android uploader and display components). That said, I'd like to do this because I want PIECES to have a rich visual experience and was thinking of recruiting more photographers, but probably not now. Thanks for your interest though.
Hey, thanks! I think I may have some references to old formats to fix, I'll go find them an fix them. I may also shorten the hash for these existing posts. If you're talking about the old URLs that also included account handle (e.g. /@handle/foo-bar-july-4) it's because I'll probably allow for handle changes but not now and I don't want to maintain a historical handle lookup table, whereas the post id will remain forever. IG does this as well.
Ah I forgot to remove the videos section. Ultimately you can just create a Gallery post with a single (short) video but we can't allow YouTube style videos yet because it's the one cost that can throw a huge wrench in our finances. I'll remove the Videos section now but all the code is there to get it working.
Docs are important because it allows a page to be customized. If you write an entry today like an About Me, it's tagged July 3, 2026 and slides down your feed. You can create an About Me as a doc and in settings -> theme you can set the doc as your landing page. The official @PIECES page (https://piecesof.me/@PIECES) landing page itself is a doc.
Good work. I signed up @joelparkerhenderson. It's unclear to me how to start using Pieces because the site says I'm awaiting approvals.
I understand the point of that for unknown accounts; perhaps you could consider faster FTUX by leveraging my other existing social accounts? E.g. GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. And/or enable me to browse public accounts or example content in the meantime?
Interesting idea, but I'm pessimistic about spawning any type of social media. I feel like a few of these types of sites start with good intentions, but eventually devolve into yet another metric to generate clout or revenue. Merely supporting advertising on such a platform already opens the door to the same problem that every other social media company has.
How do you plan to stop the social contract being changed by some successor or if you get bought out? Google was all "don't be evil" until they became evil. Not really sure of a good answer to that, other than perhaps having each user buy-in to become a shareholder, and even then, don't know if that would prevent this situation.
The problems with social networks is pretty widely understood. Simply acknowledging them as problems, with a promise to tackle, is not enough to attract people imo. It would help to go into detail how exactly you propose to solve them, what is it you would do different where others have tried and failed?
Doing it by hand now. Besides the site itself, I have spent most of my time building out the backend automation. I imagine I can manage the first 10k users myself and opening it up slow enough that a community itself develops and will be self-policing.
I got back on instagram recently and the first thing I see when I login now is content from repost accounts and it's like, do I really want to see this? Is this what happens when we optimize for engagement blindly? A hypothesis I have is that if we make rules in the beginning this will be easier to enforce at scale. See an account that's just reposting stuff -> report it -> review
I hope this isn't coming off as snarky or anything, I am honestly interested in the project...
So you're thinking something like Twitter(X)'s community notes, but instead of flagging misinformation, it will be used to 'community flag' an account as AI? Maybe it shadow bans, maybe it brings it to moderation queue, whatever...
I've seen a few of these 'NO LLM ALLOWED' sites pop up now, but any countermeasure to LLM use is easily subverted. I think the only real way to keep the LLMs out is, as you seem to agree, some sort of user-reported system (But that seems open to fraud....difficult problem to solve!)
For sure. AI is only getting better so it's not a promise I can make but it's worth stating from the beginning. But the thing about Meta/Twitter/etc.,. is that they're financially incentivized to promote these accounts (more eyes = more ad revenue) so that makes it even worse. There will never be an explicit financial incentive to run bot accounts/repost farms on PIECES (I'm sure people will try though).
I recognize that we'll have to re-think things once we hit millions of users (I am an optimist). But for the first ten thousand or hundred thousand, I'm confident we can keep it a people-centric place and then strategize for future growth once our strategies start to be less effective.
Definitely for profit, and I think the only way to really do things like this is for profit but with disclosure. The Ghost publishing platform is something I am quite inspire by, however, so I've explored that a bit too.
I want a distributed social network on top of email. Emails don’t have to be human readable. A client could be built to pass and share posts among a network via email messages. Add some clever cryptography and you can build trust networks and keep out spam more reliably.
I'm going to sound a little arrogant here but part of it is because most people don't actually believe in what they're doing. I see posts of founders who write, "hey, we started a social network, but we've since pivoted to <insert AI tool here>".
I believe in PIECES to my core. Everything I'm doing now with my full-time job so I don't have to take outside investment and saving is to get not only PIECES but my dating platform Lettr Dating off the ground. PIECES will be around in 5 years, I guarantee it, because it's the social network that I always dreamed of having - even going back in the day to 2003 when I would just post on my xanga.
This doesn't seem to have been picked up by the HN algo, which is fine. But I'm going to keep at it.
If you're in NYC, I'll be promoting PIECES and Lettr in the parks at night time, and I'll likely be hiring an intern at NYU to help me spread it around campus. If you see this and are at NYU, I'd love to chat - https://piecesof.me/p/6qrjydihiq3tikg3fb85fqcelqnhph
I don't agree. Advertising without agreed upon standards is shitty. Back in the day with 30 minute TV programs and 8 minutes of ads, the companies had to utilize their time well. They had to write, hire, research, entertain, etc.,. I still say "WUZZUHHH" to millenial friends.
What we have now on social networks is objectively shit though. Marketers cooking up AI families to sell supplements. Constant A/B testing without any hypotheses which ultimately lead to the extreme forms of clickbait imaginable. I have ideas for doing ads differently but that's a discussion for when we have hundreds of thousands of users, not when we're starting out.
The site has an elegant design and exudes a calming, inviting atmosphere.
I came across a line in the Social Contract that caught my attention: “The platforms that dominate today have drifted from their original promise. Feeds are flooded with content from accounts no one follows.”
I respectfully disagree with that. IMO the problem lies in the opposite direction. The content we see on these sites is driven by algorithms that reward popular posts and influencers. This creates a system of “stars” and “fans,” which does not foster genuine connections.
The original internet promised to give equal voices to all and allow users to see things they might otherwise miss. When I encounter a new social network like yours, especially one as elegant as this, I secretly hope it will restore that original promise.
The more I see of social media, the more I'm convinced that it's not really a fulfilling way to share and socialize on the internet. I've come to believe that anything that can platform every voice on the planet forces noise to drown out signal.
Since you've actually started a social media site, I wonder if you have any insight on that? You say you believe in this project; what is it that you think is valuable about letting everyone talk to everyone, as opposed to exclusive and curated spaces for people that semi-self-select based on community interests and values, like forums? Separately, why do you think that removing organizations/brands and psuedo users is going to be the crux of the solution?
Honestly looking to have my mind changed. But mostly just curious.
> The more I see of social media, the more I'm convinced that it's not really a fulfilling way to share and socialize on the internet.
I kinda miss the "old" social media, where it was media and also social... you would open whatever (facebook, myspace, instagram...) and you'd see your friends, plates of what they're eating, some attention seeking statuses, wedding photos, invites to birthdays, etc.
I have no idea if people stopped posting all that or if algorithm hid all that content behind random content it wanted to push instead, so you get zero of that but a lot of random news stories, "reels" and random videos from influences you don't follow and are not interested in, and basically a lot of not-social stuff. I know there's more money for the social network if they show me artificially protracted diy wideos and "you won't believe..." crap, but that made me leave one "social" network after another.
I think the whole influencer trend ruined it. You literally gave people an incentive to be as loud as possible so they can make as much money as possible. Where is the incentive to connect?
Also, Social media sold us the idea that hey you can stay in touch with everyone! But in reality, what is gave people was a new form of communication in broadcasting. In real life, you always directly interact with people or groups of people but the primary way you communicate in social media is basicslly shout into the void via status updates, stories, images etc. Its became about who you are, not a way to connect to people.
I really never bought or still buy the idea that you need social media to stay connected to your friends. I haven't used it in a decade and i still have friends who i interact with via messaging apps etc. I have never missed social media and realize most things people post have 0 relevance to my life so why am i spending my precious time going through this shit and making zuck and silly influencers money for free?
Sure, i might want to follow an influencer or two and look at their videos, but I want my "feed" to be "social", so people i choose to follow, be it real life friends, or even influencers, but not "random" content from sources I don't follow.
I have a lot of friends who have moved abroad, changed jobs, had kids, etc., and social networks gave me all that info, plus I could contact them in a "lighter" way than taking the phone and calling them, plus you could make groups of people (classmates, coworkers from previous job, etc.). There were also a lot of "we're at <local bar>, if anyone wants to join us" posts back in the time, and since i lived 5 minutes away, I joined or even posted that status if I was one of the first people there, and other came... now it's hours of coordination just to meet for a beer.
Basically, it was easier to reach people who are "not that close" to you that you would directly call them, and you find out stuff (who moved where, who has a kid now, etc.). Now I don't know any of that, but I get served a fake video of someone inserting a battery into the antenna connector of a tv.
From my personal point of view (because this is subjective of course) but like there was never any point of caring about any of those people to me. It just wasn't a good enough use of my time and the algorithims are literally desinged to make me addicted and suck away my attention. I couldn't care less if Ben who i met at work 10 years ago and havent spoken to in over 7 is having a kid or moved to Spain or whatever. I made a consious choice to step away from that and really care what I was doing with my attention which again imo has lead to better results and not a lot of social degradation (i dont think my irl social life would be different if i was on social media)
100% agree with this. The whole "influencer" industry (let's be honest it's about manipulating you) is peak enshitification.
I quit twitter cos it became a cesspool. IG needs aggressive curation and keeping notifications off. Even bluesky became rage bait. And only watch a few channels of YouTube thru FreeTube.
Maybe I just old grumpy geek but after nearly 2 decades of social media I've yet to find the "social" part. It is in the main a bucket into which anyone can vomit their media and hysteria du jour.
It was a good experiment but it's done.
Pieces has promise if they can come up with a curation process that matches the ideals of their platform. I truly hope it works out because part of me wants there to be a place online for people to share publicly without fear of doxing or advertising.
Hey, sorry for getting back to you late. Was watching a bunch of World Cup games.
I'll say this: when you log into one of the incumbent social networks like IG/X/SnapChat/Facebook and you see a post that you don't care at all to see, why are you seeing that? It's because they want you to see it. They think that this post with this content and these reactions has the highest chance of making you engage with it and see more ads. The best example of this is navigating reddit.com vs old.reddit.com. The fancier reddit.com always recommends me stuff that I don't really care about but end up clicking through on because I am weak and they know I am weak. old.reddit.com is closer to the old internet that I enjoy: I check in on topics/subreddits I'm interested in and then when nothing is new or interesting, I do other things.
Arguably, building a platform that's less addictive is foolish and leaving money on the table. But as someone who had to quit IG for 2 years (though I'm back on it now) I really don't want to sell people a digital drug addiction. I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career?
To answer your question more directly, the internet has given me a lot. One of the reasons I'm so into soccer/football is because following the /r/soccer subreddit taught me about the sport and after browsing on/off for a couple of years I can tell you all the big storylines. I never in a million years would've been a football fan if it weren't for the subreddit. I've picked up hobbies like shuffling to house music by following various shufflers on IG. I keep in touch with friends from middle school who, if I grew up in earlier decades, I would've lost contact with a long, long time ago. All because of social media.
The internet can be a great place when the platforms themselves allow us to control our attention. I'm optimistic about PIECES and the other platforms we're building. I want people to feel connected to other people. Is there anything more important than that?
> I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career
Just a tip that helped me here: I'd recommend going through a pretty significant Unsubscribe purge with those channels. I think its something that I ended up doing due to the pandemic, but I realized I was following too many "daily update" channels that just flooded my attention while the clickbait. I started by removing some of the more egregious channels and then when I'd pop into some of the more well known channels with longer "weekly updates", I realized they also would also do the same thing.
I'm still aware of news, but I'm no longer glued to the hour by hour coverage and remember to actually do and watch the things I see. I'm going to be sleeving some Magic cards later today.
Oh yeah. I'm wild baby.
lol yeah. I used YouTube as an example based on what I see people responding to. My actual YouTube feed is pretty good since I use the Unhook chrome extension and almost exclusively watch YouTube on my TV.
I think forums were, and are still largely the solution to the social issue, as you very well describe them... That's why there are still a few out there that thrive in their niches.
The problem is that way back when, circa 2005, all these places were kind nerd, and at that point in time being a nerd was still not something to be proud of, so for most people "the internet" was MSN and Fotolog, and today's internet for most of this cohort is still just an evolution of that stuff (Whatsapp and Facebook), and the newer generation didnt even get to know what the forum-scene was...
So anything people produce today, is either a replacement for nerd forums, which does not need replacement, or the social media that as crappy as it is, just works... The only new social media that is thriving is copies of other platforms that have become too much of an echo chamber to bare, so now we need another echo chamber but one for the other 50%.
I think that's why we see so many riffs on social media, people trying to make a breakthrough on things like, decentralized, more secure, less moderated, more moderated, crypto, paid, X-only, etc
And the reality is that nobody that is hooked, or cares about social media gives a shit about any of that, they want the feed, the masses want what they already have, and everybody else is just looking to be the next vBulletin watercooler reinvention.
Paradoxically, what social media is quite good at is forum discovery.
Facebook overall is a pox on humanity. Private Facebook groups, however, can be genuinely useful. I spend a lot of time in one topic-specific Facebook group (and as little time on wider Facebook as I can manage)
A “social contract” that one party changes at will and then just announces the changes is not a contract (or social) in any meaningful sense. It’s just terms and conditions with a different name.
If you want people to see it as a different thing, it needs to be a different thing.
While I understand what you're saying, what's the alternative? For an early platform to come out and say, "this is exactly how we're going to operate until the end of time and if we change our minds we'll... dissolve ourselves?"
IMO The Social Contract that we publish is a step in the right direction. If you're on IG and you look at your feed in 2018 vs 2026, you can tell that something has changed dramatically but there is nothing in writing about what IG promised in 2018 vs what they do in 2026. It's all by feel. If they published it, IG users would be able to point out every promise kept and broken.
In the future, perhaps members can sign contracts like sports stars who agree with their club to have ABC terms for XYZ years. But this is where we're starting and I'm happy to get feedback from our members on how to better assure them in future versions of The Social Contract.
I agree, but since you will have to change it, I'm just saying it's not a contract if it changes from one side.
So, e.g.:
- make it more quasi-contractually binding on yourself, in some principled, innovative way: establish a member user group, consult with them before changing it and give them the freedom to publish the minutes of the meeting, or establish some other meaningful cost of changing it
- or just call it "What we mean when we say 'social network'" or something, otherwise it's about as good as "Don't Be Evil".
> Myspace is a favela. You've ever been to a Brazilian favela? It basically, politically, represents the structure of Myspace. You've got this remote, distant, old-school Brazilian tyrant. Anti-democratic, wicked mogul, pays no attention to you, supposedly owns the whole show, but the whole shebang is going south in a hurry.
> You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can't go anywhere in Myspace, you can't organize in Myspace, you can't make money in Myspace.
> You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That's a favela. It's made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it's made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks.
> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!
> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum.
— Bruce Sterling
- i see a 100 social networks advertised daily on reddit, HN etc
- the biggest challenge you are facing is overcoming the double network effect
- in order for any of em to take off, you need to get me and my friends and their friends and so on
- one way to do this is to start a social network only for a small niche. could be anything. startups only! designers only etc and scale it up one category at a time to let the network effects come into the picture
- that is how you build a social media with 1M+ users
I actually strongly disagree with this. This is how many social media sites have failed.
I don't know if alternative social media can ever scale as large as Reddit. Tildes.net and Lemmy both have similar activity to Hacker News and I'd consider them both "successful."
The truth is that Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc are not websites used to drive connections between human beings; they're media machines meant to create ad distribution channels. And that's what users want.
When someone uses Instagram, they don't want to see their friends vacation photos - they want to see Cardi Bs latest post. Meta attaches ads to that interaction and that's how they drive revenue.
When someone uses Reddit, they aren't seeing what their neighbor has to say - they're consuming a long flowing rage bait story or a web comic. Sure, there are smaller, niche communities but that isn't the bulk of the site traffic.
And, honestly, content is addictive. I'm personally not on Reddit to make friends or deepen my connection with other humans. I'm there to scroll through memes and cat pictures.
I think that smaller social media sites fail because they don't emphasize media generation and distribution. That reframing still presents difficult problems to solve but I feel like that simple perspective pivot helps with growth. Like, if you wanted to take the "OG" Reddit approach to bootstrapping a social media site you could just programatically generate massive amounts of fake content. Rage bait stories, product placement, etc. Just firehose as much media to drive engagement until you get actual human beings to take part.
That is is growth is what you want. It's arguable whether hyperscaled social media platforms actually make society better or individuals happier.
I think "want" is a strong word here. The way I have been explaining this to my friends is that back in the day, you had a phone to call your friends and a TV to find out the news. But what if your phone was your TV and your TV was your phone? This is what present day social media is.
I think most social media/networks now are terrible for keeping in touch with people we want to hear from. I was listening to a podcast with the musician Zedd and he mentioned that in the golden days of Facebook, he could post that he was doing a show in Toronto (or any city) and every person in Toronto who followed the Zedd Facebook page would come see him. Nowadays. he could do a post about being in Toronto and his Toronto fans will be like, "wait, why didn't I know you were in Toronto? I totally would've gone!"
Ironically, I've been enjoying IG now because I have PIECES as my place to share memories. I went to Coachella and magically IG started recommending me a ton of cool Coachella content. I open my IG now and it's a ton of World Cup content. Last month it was all Knicks content. Yet when I posted about PIECES on my Facebook, neither my aunts, uncles, or cousins saw that their family member created something he was proud of. I reached out by DM to tell them about it.
This is what happens when social platforms get to use ad revenue to fund their moon shots. All they have to do is turn on more ads to get the needed capital to fund their AI and -verse bets. As another user pointed out, The Social Contract we published isn't foolproof as a basis to assure our members that PIECES will be any different than incumbent social networks. But it's certainly a start.
Yeah, I apologize for how restrictive "want" is - I'm not sure what the appropriate word is in this context. It's more that content engagement is what drives web traffic regardless of whether or not users express desire for human connection. The social part of social media doesn't drive website expansion - content does. We love it. Yum, yum, yum.
I think if you sit a lot of people down and ask them "would you rather have cat videos or the potential to meet new friends (or maintain connections with old ones)" and people will say the want the latter but reward platforms that give them the former.
Old Facebook was maybe closer to the ideal of connecting people but Meta realized that it just doesn't drive ad revenue or engagement so they refactored it to better suit ad delivery streams and put more effort into Instagram (because it's better suited for that type of revenue model).
Any particular ones that actually had a nice design or seemed well made?
https://flipso.com is a small boutique site.
It's pretty late tonight and thankfully HN has re-front paged this to my surprise so I'll just talk openly.
The playbook that you lay out is basically the playbook every social network has come up with... and where are we now in 2026? Has that playbook produced anything good?
The niche social networks don't work and will never grow beyond their niches. Everyone is trying to start the niche thing, but ultimately, photographers want to be around non-photographers, animators want to be around non-animators, etc.,. Historically this was solved by people being on the incumbent platforms like IG/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, with niche networks to fill those specialized needs in. But I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks and there will be a vacuum with new platforms vying to fill the space. These new platforms will have their own takes on what makes a good social network. PIECES is me throwing in my hat.
I built PIECES first and foremost for myself. I had a xanga that I loved, multiple tumblrs that I still reference, an insta to talk to my friends, finstas that I still sometimes lurk on, a Substack, and a Twitter that I just re-started posting in, but at this point nothing really compares to PIECES. The most analogous is tumblr but that too became a niche platform that has been abandoned. PIECES has been great for me because it's a place I can express myself without getting caught in some other company's algo while also being able to share exclusively with my friends.
I can write more but I'll finish with this. It's July 2026 and I declare that PIECES is here to stay. There is no world where I write on the home page, "Hey everyone, it's with a heavy heart that I have to tell everyone that PIECES is closing..." I've been on the internet for 28 years now. PIECES is good. It's going to be slow growth because I refuse to build in any type of addictive/gamified functionality or make false promises or w/e but as the exodus away from incumbent social media takes place, PIECES will be one of the platforms there that promises something different.
But we'll see and I'll return back to this post in July 2030. I don't think I'll be eating my words though.
> I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks
Are you willing to change your mind on this?
What evidence do you have this will happen?
It does seem that social networks can have some generational stickiness. Wrestling my family away from Facebook feels like a lost cause. But younger relatives are more active on Instagram and some other options.
But I don't see what would trigger an exodus given that everything you and I might not like about the existing social media incumbents hasn't been enough to drive people away en masse so far.
You gotta take risks sometimes. The opportunity cost of me working on this vs other projects is my risk.
To be more precise about what I mean by exodus, I don't think that instagram is going away but I do think its utility as the de facto social network to keep in touch with friends is at risk. I know a lot of people who are quitting and I know a lot of people who don't really care for it but are on it because everyone else is on it. I'll probably have an IG still in 5 years but I see a world where I don't use it much.
I get it, but form follows finance — show me how piecesof.me sustains itself and I'll tell you what kind of promises they can actually make. Lots of naive optimism out there with these types of projects.
Watch me ;)
I like the idea at a social level/product level, but at this point I don't think I'd use any social network that wasn't open at a protocol level in some way. ATProto/etc would be a great tech backbone for this, and would then let users self host their content, it would let orgs run their own views, it would let archivers archive content for posterity, it would open the door to possible federation in ways that suited the network in the future. Re-inventing all of that from scratch would be a terrible idea, and would lose focus.
Good work! I am hopeful for a social network that is not craving to increase engagement and going viral. I posted a sample but and created a profile.
But when I went to the Docs tab in my profile, it says...
Doc Not Found The doc "how-to-use-pieces" could not be found
I THINK I fixed it... should be up in 10 minutes. The reason: the try.piecesof.me flow creates a profile in a sort of exists-but-also-doesnt-exists state. Made a change so that the doc is viewable in that middle state. But anyone who claimed it, before and now, would've been able to see the doc.
Thanks for trying it out though and I hope to see you on the platform.
Do you have any plans to support Ultra HDR images, on the Android app and/or other platforms? I did some browsing of the site and didn't see any examples (but that doesn't mean it's unsupported).
I really enjoy that aspect for sharing photography on Instagram, and the support (at the client level, at least) is fairly straightforward (see https://developer.android.com/media/grow/ultra-hdr/display).
The idea of the platform does sound great, and the application seems very polished from what I can tell so far.
I actually had to look this up. Currently we don't but apparently we could support it if you upload via the web. Our mobile apps use Expo and the native image picker re-encodes the image.
If you're interested still despite limitations (Ultra HDR Images also won't be seen by many people) I can look into this more.
Thanks for taking a look! I haven't used Expo, but looking at the docs I wonder if using 'allowEditing: false' and 'exif: true' in the ImagePickerOptions would bypass reencoding? The gainmap is stored in the EXIF data. Instagram is similar in that the gainmap is stripped if you edit the image at all, cropping included, but if no crops or filters are done then the image retains the gainmap.
Either way if the clients are able to render the HDR images, I think uploading on web is still a usable implementation.
I just did some more research and we probably won't do the work until there's more demand. We can actually easily support it on desktop (we upload the raw bytes but always default to serving a compressed version, which I can override for HDR) but for mobile there's no drop-in solution for Expo apps and thus would have to build 4 new things (iOS and Android uploader and display components). That said, I'd like to do this because I want PIECES to have a rich visual experience and was thinking of recruiting more photographers, but probably not now. Thanks for your interest though.
That's fair enough, thanks for taking a look into it anyway!
The software is really well-made.
I wonder why you change the links from the internal ones to this format https://piecesof.me/p/5b2w8x6sn2mwkdhppfusvqsf8z5h1t ?
The writing is quite nice. I don't understand the "Docs". And I'd suggest to make it very easy to write my first post. The big editor is a bit scary.
also here: https://piecesof.me/videos - where do I get prompted to upload my own video?
Anyway, good luck! Let's see how long I can stick around.
Hey, thanks! I think I may have some references to old formats to fix, I'll go find them an fix them. I may also shorten the hash for these existing posts. If you're talking about the old URLs that also included account handle (e.g. /@handle/foo-bar-july-4) it's because I'll probably allow for handle changes but not now and I don't want to maintain a historical handle lookup table, whereas the post id will remain forever. IG does this as well.
Ah I forgot to remove the videos section. Ultimately you can just create a Gallery post with a single (short) video but we can't allow YouTube style videos yet because it's the one cost that can throw a huge wrench in our finances. I'll remove the Videos section now but all the code is there to get it working.
Docs are important because it allows a page to be customized. If you write an entry today like an About Me, it's tagged July 3, 2026 and slides down your feed. You can create an About Me as a doc and in settings -> theme you can set the doc as your landing page. The official @PIECES page (https://piecesof.me/@PIECES) landing page itself is a doc.
Good work. I signed up @joelparkerhenderson. It's unclear to me how to start using Pieces because the site says I'm awaiting approvals.
I understand the point of that for unknown accounts; perhaps you could consider faster FTUX by leveraging my other existing social accounts? E.g. GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. And/or enable me to browse public accounts or example content in the meantime?
Interesting idea, but I'm pessimistic about spawning any type of social media. I feel like a few of these types of sites start with good intentions, but eventually devolve into yet another metric to generate clout or revenue. Merely supporting advertising on such a platform already opens the door to the same problem that every other social media company has.
How do you plan to stop the social contract being changed by some successor or if you get bought out? Google was all "don't be evil" until they became evil. Not really sure of a good answer to that, other than perhaps having each user buy-in to become a shareholder, and even then, don't know if that would prevent this situation.
The problems with social networks is pretty widely understood. Simply acknowledging them as problems, with a promise to tackle, is not enough to attract people imo. It would help to go into detail how exactly you propose to solve them, what is it you would do different where others have tried and failed?
Neither open source nor federated? Why would we takes steps backwards in this way?
Do you have some sort of detection for 'faceless accounts' ? Or are you moderating that by hand?
I like the idea, but how do you actually enforce the 'no bots' model?
Doing it by hand now. Besides the site itself, I have spent most of my time building out the backend automation. I imagine I can manage the first 10k users myself and opening it up slow enough that a community itself develops and will be self-policing.
I got back on instagram recently and the first thing I see when I login now is content from repost accounts and it's like, do I really want to see this? Is this what happens when we optimize for engagement blindly? A hypothesis I have is that if we make rules in the beginning this will be easier to enforce at scale. See an account that's just reposting stuff -> report it -> review
I hope this isn't coming off as snarky or anything, I am honestly interested in the project...
So you're thinking something like Twitter(X)'s community notes, but instead of flagging misinformation, it will be used to 'community flag' an account as AI? Maybe it shadow bans, maybe it brings it to moderation queue, whatever...
I've seen a few of these 'NO LLM ALLOWED' sites pop up now, but any countermeasure to LLM use is easily subverted. I think the only real way to keep the LLMs out is, as you seem to agree, some sort of user-reported system (But that seems open to fraud....difficult problem to solve!)
For sure. AI is only getting better so it's not a promise I can make but it's worth stating from the beginning. But the thing about Meta/Twitter/etc.,. is that they're financially incentivized to promote these accounts (more eyes = more ad revenue) so that makes it even worse. There will never be an explicit financial incentive to run bot accounts/repost farms on PIECES (I'm sure people will try though).
I recognize that we'll have to re-think things once we hit millions of users (I am an optimist). But for the first ten thousand or hundred thousand, I'm confident we can keep it a people-centric place and then strategize for future growth once our strategies start to be less effective.
Is this site inclusive of nonhuman identities? [0]
It seems incredibly focused on "real humans" etc, which is (common...), but my real identity doesn't exist in the physical world.
(There are also multiple of them thanks to DID, but that tends to require a significant rearchitecture to accommodate)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
We'll have to open a committee to launch an investigation to produce a report about whether accounts held by Otherkin should be allowed.
Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.
FWIW, I think if you're serious about building, you probably don't have resources to allocate to committees on mental disorders.
Don't even start with this. Being queer is not a mental disorder.
That almost sounds satirical, but if you are serious about this, thank you. <3
Haha love the video link!
Would you consider continuing this as a non-profit?
Definitely for profit, and I think the only way to really do things like this is for profit but with disclosure. The Ghost publishing platform is something I am quite inspire by, however, so I've explored that a bit too.
I want a distributed social network on top of email. Emails don’t have to be human readable. A client could be built to pass and share posts among a network via email messages. Add some clever cryptography and you can build trust networks and keep out spam more reliably.
I’ve seen a few posts about a “better social network” tried a few even thought about making my own.
It seems hard to get them off the ground.
I wonder if the answer to the enshittification of social networks is “no social network at all”.
I'm going to sound a little arrogant here but part of it is because most people don't actually believe in what they're doing. I see posts of founders who write, "hey, we started a social network, but we've since pivoted to <insert AI tool here>".
I believe in PIECES to my core. Everything I'm doing now with my full-time job so I don't have to take outside investment and saving is to get not only PIECES but my dating platform Lettr Dating off the ground. PIECES will be around in 5 years, I guarantee it, because it's the social network that I always dreamed of having - even going back in the day to 2003 when I would just post on my xanga.
This doesn't seem to have been picked up by the HN algo, which is fine. But I'm going to keep at it.
If you're in NYC, I'll be promoting PIECES and Lettr in the parks at night time, and I'll likely be hiring an intern at NYU to help me spread it around campus. If you see this and are at NYU, I'd love to chat - https://piecesof.me/p/6qrjydihiq3tikg3fb85fqcelqnhph
Best of luck!
Thank you! Appreciate it.
How do we know this social network will not enshittify?
The only social network that hasn't enshittified is most likely Mastodon.
Why isn't this social network open source?
> PIECES is a product created by a for-profit company, and we are not anti-advertising.
Advertising IS a form of enshittification.
It is the same model of almost every social network.
I don't agree. Advertising without agreed upon standards is shitty. Back in the day with 30 minute TV programs and 8 minutes of ads, the companies had to utilize their time well. They had to write, hire, research, entertain, etc.,. I still say "WUZZUHHH" to millenial friends.
What we have now on social networks is objectively shit though. Marketers cooking up AI families to sell supplements. Constant A/B testing without any hypotheses which ultimately lead to the extreme forms of clickbait imaginable. I have ideas for doing ads differently but that's a discussion for when we have hundreds of thousands of users, not when we're starting out.
The site has an elegant design and exudes a calming, inviting atmosphere.
I came across a line in the Social Contract that caught my attention: “The platforms that dominate today have drifted from their original promise. Feeds are flooded with content from accounts no one follows.”
I respectfully disagree with that. IMO the problem lies in the opposite direction. The content we see on these sites is driven by algorithms that reward popular posts and influencers. This creates a system of “stars” and “fans,” which does not foster genuine connections.
The original internet promised to give equal voices to all and allow users to see things they might otherwise miss. When I encounter a new social network like yours, especially one as elegant as this, I secretly hope it will restore that original promise.