Alternatives
Products that do what OpenDolphin – A Community Built Open Source Social Network does
Hey HN! I'm trying to create a community of people that are willing to contribute to the OpenDolphin project. The goal of the project is to build an Open Source _centralized_ social network that would ideally compete with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The main difference between the well established social and this one would be that it is going to be built and managed in the public, in the most transparent way possible. Features will be implemented and requested by the community - and generally speaking everything would be community-centric. If the project takes off, this might become one…
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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
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I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
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Hi Everyone, Today I'm proud to announce the upcoming launch of Postcard. You can visit the launch page here - http://www.postcardsocial.net However, since this is Hacker News, I thought the community might be more interested in my blog entry which explains in detail why the project should be of interest to developers including information about the open API Protocol it will adhere to. You can read the blog entry here - http://blog.postcardsocial.net/introducing-postcard/ Feedback is welcome and appreciated. I'm actively looking for beta testers and you can sign…
2013
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TLDR: I built a "quick and dirty " private social network for my friends, posted on Reddit and HN, got some interest so now have built it properly along with my brother. site link: https://intimost.com/login/ demo creds: [email protected] Demo123! Full version: I needed a social network where I can just send updates and nothing else. So I built it, my friends liked and now I have built it "for the world". Everything is private by default. - Text-only updates - No likes. Only views to acknowledge a post - [in development] Comments are private between the poster and…
Oct 2025
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2018 · blogmesh.org
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A proof of concept i've developed several months ago . The idea was to build a social network without users and learn Django. Warm Regards from Argentina. Martin.
2012 · doadoing.com
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Please have a look at www.socialeaks.com and tell me what you think. This is my first adventure in coding (my background is not CS). I started learning rails about a month ago via railstutorial.org. When I finished that, I felt the best way to continue learning would be to just build an app from scratch. I came up with this concept while observing how crazy the world had gone over WikiLeaks. I thought this was a funny idea. I also thought it would be fun to build! So, here I am. I built this in rails 3 and it is currently living on Heroku. It took me about two weeks to code, doing just about…
2011
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Hey everyone! I built a little side project called OpenQuest over the last three weeks, and I'm looking for some feedback to see if it's worth taking further. The idea is simple: it's a place to create a chat room where you can connect with people (a maximum of 8) who have the same goal as you, for a short time (7 days for now). Think of it as a way to stay motivated, hold each other accountable, or simply work together with new people on something specific. Some examples can be: - Following a programming course - Reading a book - Getting back to the gym - Cleaning up your home - Shopping…
2024 · openquest.app
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We’re building Poppin — a browser extension that turns any webpage into a shared social space. Users can chat in real-time, leave post, or host voice spaces with their communities on any URL. It’s like turning the internet into a live Twitch stream or Reddit communities — for every url of the web without requiring integration. Currently, we’re in invite-only beta and collecting feedback from early users. Try it out and let us know what feels smooth, what feels broken, and what you’d want more of. Intro Video: https://x.com/poppin_so/status/1843651417783054776 Request…
2025 · poppin.so
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Hi HN, I'm the creator of epress. After a lot of work, I'm excited (and a bit nervous) to finally share it with you. For years, I've been feeling like a digital tenant on the platforms I use every day. My content, my social graph, my online identity—they were all stored on someone else's servers, subject to their rules, algorithms, and business models. I could be de-platformed, my data could be sold, or an API I relied on could suddenly be put behind a paywall. I looked into existing decentralized alternatives. While many are great projects, I found they often shifted the trust from a big…
Sep 2025 · github.com
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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
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This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
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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
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Hi HN, I’ve been building a small social network where the feed is always chronological — newest posts come first, always. It’s not 100% algorithm-free (there’s still basic filtering to avoid spam or abuse), but the core idea is that every user has a real chance to be seen, even with zero followers. It’s lightweight, works well on mobile, and supports both posts and comments. Most of the content is currently in Portuguese, since it started with a Brazilian audience, but the interface is mostly language-neutral. I’d love any feedback on the concept, UX, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · qqpost.netlify.app
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Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016
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Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
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One year ago, I downloaded the news.arc code and decided that I would teach myself programming by building a better aggregator. At that time, I had some rudimentary HTML knowledge, and little FORTRAN under my belt. I knew that I wanted an aggregator that could support a wide range of submissions, and one that could scale without losing quality for the user. Hubski is what I have to show for my time and effort. The easiest way to describe Hubski is to say that it uses a commenting system akin to HN or Reddit, but uses a sharing scheme like Twitter. You have a personal feed comprised of the…
2011
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Heya! We're longtime lurkers and do sometimes post, today however I want to present to you with the fruits of almost 4 years of work, hacking, designing, physically building (for the record: 2 years full time). We'd love to get some feedback from you guys and feel free to give us any hints on what we could/should change, or any opinion on whether you think that'd be something you'd use. protonet.info So here's our rough plan: We love the web and the possibilities it gives us, we also love the way the cloud allows us instant and ubiquitous access to our data and apps. Now what we don't like…
2012
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2014 · whoaverse.com
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