Alternatives
Products that do what Current social media platforms are abusing us does
Hi HN, over the years of using the social media (Instagram, Pinterest, etc..), I’m quite weary of the trend that people tend to polish their content so well and post the perfect aspect of their lives. I feel like that I’m not one of them, and anything I post will be either not so polished to fit the “magazine” style of the community or so insignificant for anyone else to care about. Scrolling in those apps more and more and seeing more and more perfect lives, I feel like I was abused by those platforms and made me anxious about myself. I want an online space that can give my voice back,…
- 1WD
Hey there, First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour,…
2022 · oncircles.com
- 2SD
Hey fellow HN-ers, I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word). We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale. We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ If you want…
2012
- 3MA
Hello. :) I've noticed for the last few years it feels like everyone has been saying the same thing, that social media got baaad, timelines feel hostile, nothing you see is actually from people you chose to follow, and every platform seems optimized for outrage, screenshots, and engagement bait rather than the original microblog ideas of the early 2010s I miss the 2010 social styles, where you have to share your @name with a friend IRL because search wasn't really search... A place where you followed people, saw what they wrote, stumbled into interesting discussions, and hashtags meant…
Jan 2026 · meepr.co
- 4
- 5QU
So I just did my semi-annual "log in to Twitter to see if it's any good yet", and found that in my absence I had followed a few thousand new spam accounts. Sweet. That explains why they emailed me and forced me to change my password last year. Being Awesome, Twitter doesn't have any way to simply toss out all your followers and start from scratch. And none of the spammy apps claiming to do so actually will (even seemingly after charging you money to try). So instead, I just pulled open the Dev console and did this:…
2014
- 6FB
Hello I’m Aditya. Me and my co-founder are on a mission to eradicate social media addiction and loneliness off the earth. There’s no reason for us to turn to digital companions of any kind, or be in social isolation, when we can and should be having direct discussions with each other everyday. We're building FourthSpace as a solution to these issues. One of the biggest problems many people are dealing with right now which is preventing them from hanging out with others is the cost of going out, buying drinks, transportation, etc. We've built a beta version of a feature to solve this. If you…
Apr 2026 · fourthspace.vip
- 7IM
Hey all, I've been working hard on my side project and will be trying to turn it into my main project now. Rated is a social rating platform for media, places and products. By having everything in one place, its easier to add friends, follow and compare ratings. There are cool data features like similarity scores between each users and predicted ratings for every item. The main aim is to help people discover the best content in a fun and social way. I've made a website (not that pretty yet) and launched on the app stores, but there's a long way to go. Still haven't properly validated the…
2024 · rated.fun
- 8AI
We just launched the first version of Pidgeon. It’s meant to be a sort of “reddit for photos”, and we’re trying to fix a lot of the problems instagram has. Quite a lot of people these days hate instagram for one reason or another. Maybe you hate the amount of ads it has. Maybe you hate the algorithm. Maybe you hate the shop section that no one ever uses. Maybe you hate the data collection, or reels, or that it just seems like a giant popularity contest. We want to address all of the above. Organic outreach The feed is organized chronologically. Here you will only see your own posts and the…
2022
- 9PA
Hi everyone, I've been building a less bad way to share photos and videos out to friends and family: https://vzg.me The motivation is personal for me since... 1. I'm not comfortable using Facebook properties 2. Group SMS/email gets out of control with more than a few recipients 3. I don't want to convince my friends and family to download a new app or figure out shared albums So I created a system that lets my network subscribe to individual people in my family and get updates via email, SMS, or RSS at the frequency of their choosing (immediate, daily, or weekly). Subscribers…
2020
- 10SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 11PP
Hello! I just wanted to drop in to let you know about a new platform I’m developing that I think could benefit you. I was finding that the mediums I was searching to find freelance work (Twitter, freelance job sites, etc) weren’t really providing me with projects that matched my interests or skill set AND it is a lot of work to find projects through these mediums. My vision is to create a freelance job market that will make it easy for freelancers and people looking for some freelance work to find the perfect partnership by adding a human element to the process (that isn’t you combing…
2016
- 12IM
welcome to the future of social media. https://github.com/ktyldev/singularity
2024 · singular1ty.tech
- 13SH
Did this during the holidays and just finished with few extra features: http://thingsand.me/ And an example blog: http://thingsand.me/jori I tried to keep the platform as simple as possible and focus on the images instead of making yet another blogging platform. Time will tell for what people are going to use it. I hope to add API soon (iPhone uploader would be awesome to blog daily activities).
2011
- 14IB
Building integrations for TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn got frustrating with how different every platform is with auth setup, rate limits, and media requirements. So we built Post for Me: one REST API that handles scheduling and publishing posts for TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Threads. It's built for developers. You bring your own app credentials from the social platform, so you're in control of your data. There's no limitations on account connections, and pricing is based on usage (not some arbitrary limitations). We…
2025 · postforme.dev
- 15IB
I've been frustrated by so many blogging platforms. Last I used Ghost. I thought it was expensive and I hated that www I had to prefix on custom domain. So, I built https://lykhari.com just for myself and then opened for public. If you want something simple do try. It became profitable and hence self sustaining!
2025 · lykhari.com
- 16ST
Hey HN. We've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative with a focus on building a place for people to create communities instead of just buckets of posts. We want communities to feel like a place where you want to hang out instead of just scroll. At a high level, our platform is like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We took all of the best features from each of those platforms and combined them under one umbrella. Here's a list of the core features of each community: 1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for…
2023 · sociables.substack.com
- 17IB
Hey HN, sharing something I've been working on. I love reading new voices. I subscribe to a lot of brilliant newsletters but found it hard to keep track of all the great stuff I was reading. I'd read something, love it, never be able to find it again. And then, how do you find new ones worth trying? And which posts do you start with? With Inbox World, you can submit and upvote the best of Substack and other similar platforms. The goal is to build a community around the best independent writing out there. It's like HN for newsletters! This is a passion project for me and I'm not technical at…
2022 · inboxworld.io
- 18ML
I run a weekly humorous newsletter about the tech industry/tech jobs called TechLoaf (https://www.techloaf.io/). After experimenting, A/B/C/D/E testing, etc I found that using the lowest, simplest landing page possible actually led me to gain thousands more followers and a much higher conversion. I don't even post content on the site - the content is only accessible through the newsletter itself (or links or search, but nobody does that). Part of me wonders how much of modern UI/UX is oversell, especially when explaining value proposition to an…
2019
- 19BA
I noticed I had reduced my posts to Facebook because I was self-conscious about what people would think. At the same time, I had an urge to post so I could receive validation by way of likes.
2015 · chinchin.co
- 20MS
The following HN post prompted me to make this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168220 I have created http://onememory.me Alright, so it's not super-viral. It has been online for about 3 hours, so far. I made two or three tweets about it, and posted it on my Facebook wall. Within the three hours, I've seen ~200 unique visitors and had only 31 of them register. A very large percentage of that traffic all came from Twitter. Not many people seem to be sharing their URLs by way of my "tweet this" or facebook share buttons, though. I'll be making those more prominent soon. It's a similar…
2011
- 21TW
Hi! 3 months ago, while I was exploring my Facebook newsfeed, was the first time I really got bored of Facebook. I started to wonder why, and to be honest - I haven't figured it out yet. But I did start to think of the gaps Facebook doesn't cover. Maybe I'm wrong, but one of the things that came up to me is the subject of interests and users will to use social networks in order to get to know new friends (real ones), in an efficient-good way. I thought combining those two gaps is a really good idea. So I started to develop that big idea (double meaning) - interests based social network. The…
2012
- 22IB
I missed what social media used to feel like, so I made an app to share real moments without algorithms deciding what matters. On the Apple App Store only, sorry Android.
Oct 2025 · apps.apple.com
- 23UA
Hey everyone, I'm Sean, and I've built UpBeat. Why did I build this? Well, the world is more complex than ever, and every stream, device and social feed screams for our attention whilst telling us that everything is awful. While it's important to know what's going on in the world - do we really need to be bombarded with negativity 24/7? Absolutely not! It's bad for our mental health, it's bad for our attention spans, and it's bad for society as a whole. So that's why I built UpBeat - My friends, loved ones, and I needed a break from the doom cycle. So, here it is :) Some technical…
Nov 2025 · upbeat.mitchelltechnologies.co.uk
- 24AS
Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…
2015
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