domo__knows · 7 days 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

domo__knows · 7 days 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

domo__knows · 7 days 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.

domo__knows · 6 days 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.

domo__knows · 5 days 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.

rexpop · 5 days 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

domo__knows · 5 days ago

Thank you! Appreciate it.

ajsnigrutin · 5 days 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.

domo__knows · 5 days ago

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?

pelagicAustral · 5 days ago

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.

dofm · 5 days ago

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)

domo__knows · 5 days 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) landing page itself is a doc.

iJohnDoe · 5 days ago

Any particular ones that actually had a nice design or seemed well made?

domo__knows · 5 days 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.

OhSoHumble · 5 days ago

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.

domo__knows · 4 days 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.

domo__knows · 5 days 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.

domo__knows · 5 days ago

Watch me ;)

domo__knows · 4 days 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.