7 ms·

Show HN: Pieces – Social network for people

64 points by domo__knows 3mo ago

Hey HN, long time lurker first time poster. I built a social network called PIECES. After building a private blog last year after I had to get off IG and Substack, I decided to productize it. It's here now. It has a dedicated web experience + iOS/Android. Would love if you tried it out!

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dpoloncsak 3mo ago
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?
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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
  - dpoloncsak 3mo ago
    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!)
    - domo__knows 3mo ago
      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.
ciefa 3mo ago
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andrewstuart 3mo ago
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”.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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 https://piecesof.me/p/6qrjydihiq3tikg3fb85fqcelqnhph
- deleted 3mo ago
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LoganDark 3mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    That almost sounds satirical, but if you are serious about this, thank you. <3
  - holistio 3mo ago
    FWIW, I think if you're serious about building, you probably don't have resources to allocate to committees on mental disorders.
    - LoganDark 3mo ago
      Don't even start with this. Being queer is not a mental disorder.
      - holistio 3mo ago
        I didn't say anything about being queer. Also, if you grep the wikipedia page it doesn't include "queer" but it does include "disorder".
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animanoir 3mo ago
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kcoppock 3mo ago
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 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.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
  - kcoppock 3mo ago
    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.
    - domo__knows 3mo ago
      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.
dofm 3mo ago
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.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
  - dofm 3mo ago
    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".
- rexpop 3mo ago
  > 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
danpalmer 3mo ago
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.
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zhxiaoliang 3mo ago
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.
sghiassy 3mo ago
Best of luck!
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  Thank you! Appreciate it.
catapart 3mo ago
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.
- ajsnigrutin 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - altmanaltman 3mo ago
    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?
tillcarlos 3mo ago
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 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 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.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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 https://piecesof.me/@PIECES) landing page itself is a doc.
vivzkestrel 3mo ago
- 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
- iJohnDoe 3mo ago
  Any particular ones that actually had a nice design or seemed well made?
  - thm 3mo ago
    https://flipso.com https://flipso.com is a small boutique site.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
sherryf123 3mo ago
Haha love the video link! Would you consider continuing this as a non-profit?
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
askvictor 3mo ago
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.
annjose 3mo ago
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
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
potamic 3mo ago
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?
benonsocial 3mo ago
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.
jph 3mo ago
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?
singpolyma3 3mo ago
Neither open source nor federated? Why would we takes steps backwards in this way?
gavindo 3mo ago
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.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  Watch me ;)
colesantiago 3mo ago
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.
- domo__knows 3mo ago
  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.
macinjosh 3mo ago
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.

64 points by domo__knows 3mo ago

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dpoloncsak 3mo ago

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?

domo__knows 3mo ago
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
- dpoloncsak 3mo ago
  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!)
  - domo__knows 3mo ago
    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.

ciefa 3mo ago

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andrewstuart 3mo ago

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”.

domo__knows 3mo ago
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 https://piecesof.me/p/6qrjydihiq3tikg3fb85fqcelqnhph
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LoganDark 3mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  That almost sounds satirical, but if you are serious about this, thank you. <3
- holistio 3mo ago
  FWIW, I think if you're serious about building, you probably don't have resources to allocate to committees on mental disorders.
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    Don't even start with this. Being queer is not a mental disorder.
    - holistio 3mo ago
      I didn't say anything about being queer. Also, if you grep the wikipedia page it doesn't include "queer" but it does include "disorder".
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animanoir 3mo ago

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kcoppock 3mo ago

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 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.

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.
- kcoppock 3mo ago
  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.
  - domo__knows 3mo ago
    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.

dofm 3mo ago

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.

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.
- dofm 3mo ago
  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".
rexpop 3mo ago
> 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

danpalmer 3mo ago

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.

deleted 3mo ago
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zhxiaoliang 3mo ago

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.

sghiassy 3mo ago

Best of luck!

domo__knows 3mo ago
Thank you! Appreciate it.

catapart 3mo ago

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.

ajsnigrutin 3mo ago
> 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.
- altmanaltman 3mo ago
  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?

tillcarlos 3mo ago

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 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 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.

domo__knows 3mo ago
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 https://piecesof.me/@PIECES) landing page itself is a doc.

vivzkestrel 3mo ago

- 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

iJohnDoe 3mo ago
Any particular ones that actually had a nice design or seemed well made?
- thm 3mo ago
  https://flipso.com https://flipso.com is a small boutique site.
domo__knows 3mo ago
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.

sherryf123 3mo ago

Haha love the video link! Would you consider continuing this as a non-profit?

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.

askvictor 3mo ago

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.

annjose 3mo ago

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

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.

potamic 3mo ago

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?

benonsocial 3mo ago

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.

jph 3mo ago

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?

singpolyma3 3mo ago

Neither open source nor federated? Why would we takes steps backwards in this way?

gavindo 3mo ago

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.

domo__knows 3mo ago
Watch me ;)

colesantiago 3mo ago

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.

domo__knows 3mo ago
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.

macinjosh 3mo ago

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.