Alternatives
Products that do what Smithereen – an early-Facebook-style Fediverse server does
Hey! I'm Gregory Klyushnikov, a former lead Android developer at VKontakte, Russia's Facebook. And I hate enshittification with a burning passion. I quit in 2016 because the mismatch in values with the new management started driving me crazy. My core issue with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, VKontakte, and other commercial, centralized social network services is that they all eventually drift away from "staying updated on your friends' lives" towards "getting world news", "communicating with businesses", "a town square", "a place to look at ads", "endless supply of brainrot", and all kinds of…
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We spent a lot of time working on this, including the demo, and we'd love some feedback. It might take a little bit of time to load if lots of people are trying the demo, so please try to be patient. We spent a lot of time to ensure you'll be impressed. Feel free to email us at tony or chuck @graphmuse.com if you'd like to discuss further!
2012 · graphmuse.com
- 9IB
I wanted to free my time for working out and my family, so I built a social media scheduler that doesn't break all the time. It has cross-posting across all major social media platforms. The platform is built with NestJS, Kafka, Redis for the backend, Nextjs for the landing, and React with Vite for the frontend private part. I'd love to get your thoughts on what more inside would save you time from going to all those different platforms one by one.
2025 · postfa.st
- 10MA
Hey HN, I'm a longtime reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me and two friends, and we're building this upon another app we made called EmailYak, an API to receive email. We're trying something new and releasing the documentation to an app while we're still building it. We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories? 1) You've built an app with two distinct groups of users (say, people with cars and those looking for a ride) and they were able to communicate with each other. Did you expose personal email addresses? Did you send…
2011 · messagify.com
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- 12MA
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
- 13M1
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daveganly.yarrly Hi, this is Yarrly - my first android app, backed up server side by a mongo & node.js backend. It’s a two-panel image generator, and quite a fun experiment in a no-login (‘anonymous’) app. You generate two panel images using photos or gallery pics, and add text, then it’s uploaded to Yarrly.com - creating an instagram-like link. For example you create http://yarrly.com/y/4hhs6ryyq73da533d, then android intents mean that if you open that link on a device that has Yarrly, you can…
2013
- 14PI
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
- 15ZA
As a self-hoster myself, I've been missing some of the nicer features for other PaaS and wanted to have them for my own side projects, so i set out to build a custom platform as a service that is self-hosted. Today after a whole year of working on it and using it for all my projects, I put out an initial stable version for the project for everyone to try. website link : https://zaneops.dev repo link : https://github.com/zane-ops/zane-ops (PS: yes, the website for zaneops is hosted on zaneops) Would love to hear your thoughts
2025 · zaneops.dev
- 16HM
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
- 17OA
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…
2022 · about.opendolphin.social
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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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Hello! I just made my first web app with Sinatra. It is a REST API that helps people add two-step verification to their websites or apps. I am a complete noob in web development so please criticize me and let me know how shitty this whole thing is. :) http://two-step.herokuapp.com/
2014
- 20SN
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
- 21MF
I've been working the last months on a Twitter app for Windows Phone called Ocell. It all started as a test project to explore development in that platform, but I started to give it more time and released it to the Marketplace. It's my first serious project and I would like to know what does HN think about it. It's also opensourced, so you can also take a look at the code on GitHub (https://github.com/gjulianm/Ocell). It would be really great to have your feedback on this :) Thanks a lot! Windows Phone Store link: http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=2ca75e0f-69a4-42e9-b788-dedc31afb82a
2012
- 22AS
I made an AI version of thread/twitter, where you are the only human user and everyone else is an AI friend. It’s called Melonn(melonn.xyz), a human-free AI social space. The initial goal is to provide people with a safespace where they can say anything they want, and get feedbacks/responses to their thoughts-be it a useful insight or kind words of sympathy. If you ever feel lonely, lost, bored or sad just come here and express how you feel without having to care about what others would think. We are actively looking for feedbacks/opinions to improve the service! Thank you.
2024 · melonn.xyz
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Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
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Hello HN, I built Teamates.io[0] - a place for professionals to have small coffee chats with a random partner right now. Think of it like a virtual coffeeshop where you can chat with strangers while you're taking a little break. It's in open beta and you can try using it right now. Please be nice and professional to each other :) I noticed over the course of pandemic I missed random coffee chats with my coworkers and random chats with strangers. I think it's important to have these unplanned conversations. I would really appreciate the feedback from you all, since I believe it's a pretty…
2021
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