Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to swytch.net - my attempt at a social network
I've just launched swytch.net, a little social network I've been working on for a month or so. It's nowhere near ready for public consumption but the core ideas are there and I'd be interested to hear what others think. Here are some of the things that I think differentiate it from facebook and co: 1) multiple profiles: having one set of "friends" from all your different social circles limits you to sharing only what you're willing to share with the entire group. On swytch, a user can have a separate, distinct profile for each social circle. 2) robust privacy: each profile is either public…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. swytch.net - my attempt at a social network launched in 2010; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1MH
Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 2
Browser Buddy▲156Hey HN, thank you for being a part of the internet we love. We’re Arnav, Mo, Jeremy and we’re building an “Internet for-you page” that recommends blogs and essays based on your interests. Try it here (https://www.browserbuddy.com/)! We love to discover and learn from personal blogs, essays, and articles on the internet. But despite exciting advancements in language modeling, it’s felt harder to discover interesting links from real people. We believe there is untapped potential to use these language models as “curators” rather than “creators”. To explore this, we’re building a…
Dec 2025 · browserbuddy.com · its alternatives →
- 3WD
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 · its alternatives →
- 4AM
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
Quickpost▲10Hi 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 · its alternatives →
- 6HA
Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?
2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Teapotnet▲73Private social network for file sharing and streaming
2014 · teapotnet.org · its alternatives →
- 8MF
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 · its alternatives →
- 9SO
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
Mosslet▲15I’ve been building a privacy-first social network for some time now, as a healthier alternative to Big Social, and it has at times felt like a Sisyphean task. The latest gap I’ve been confronting is key authenticity, and while it hasn’t been an actual security issue we have effectively closed it. Cheers.
2025 · mosslet.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN! For a while I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a community for tech bloggers to get together and share what they’re working on, so here’s my attempt at making my own. It’s a completely free website and designed to be super straightforward to use. Functionality wise it’s pretty minimalist right now, with just the ability to register accounts, post drafts, and comment on other user’s posts. Support for more features like tagging post topics, user profiles and more are coming soon! Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear any thoughts from the community. P.S. if you don’t…
2024 · review.caleb.software · its alternatives →
- 12
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 · its alternatives →
- 13WP
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 · its alternatives →
- 14MP
My first "real" web app! I appreciate any comments/suggestions.<p>Also I am available for hire. Contact me at www.sambolgert.com
2012 · se.cret.ly · its alternatives →
- 15OA
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 · its alternatives →
- 16GM
Just finished this over the last few weekends, wanted to get this in front of a few users. A few things: - There are no users as of me posting this. - Add "Hacker News" to your interests once you've signed up. It'll allow us to see each other. - You will only see other users with similar interests. - Only common interests will be revealed. Let me know any feedback/suggestions/bugs/idea sucks, etc.
2011 · its alternatives →
- 17SL
We are looking to get feedback for http://www.samefeather.com. We have tried this with friends and family but want to get some critical feedback (note to self: do this sooner next time). SameFeather is a location based network of people with similar interests. Our emphasis is offline. We provide a way for people to find others in their vicinity that share their interests and meet them offline. We are trying to stay away from calling it a social network because that seems to scare away a lot of people. The differentiating factor from whats already out there is we focus on individuals and…
2011 · samefeather.com. · its alternatives →
- 18AS
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 · its alternatives →
- 19AA
Got started with Rails earlier this week. Thought it'd be fun if I built something quick based on the introductory tutorial I've always been fascinated by the actions of others when complete and absolute anonymity is granted. Especially when they are put into a position of power. The goal of this project is simply to see what happens to the site. Have at it! https://anonblog.herokuapp.com/
2013 · anonblog.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →
- 20MF
I'm getting my feet wet in programming again and wanted to learn Rails. So I followed railstutorial.org (you'll recognize the similarity if you've gone through it yourself) and changed a few fields around and created LinkRawr, a simple site to find and share links. It's here: http://linkrawr.heroku.com It works like Twitter, you follow others' links and people follow your links. You can follow me here: http://linkrawr.heroku.com/Justin I created this over the past couple of days and I'm a relative newbie when it comes to programming, so it's far from a polished project, but I thought I'd…
2011 · linkrawr.heroku.com · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 22MN
Link: http://this.isby.us/ I've been working on this on and off for a few weeks as part of an apprenticeship program with a Rails shop. I was given the opportunity to create a 'toy' app to learn more about Rails development. The basic idea is this: If you know people you often share links with, you can create a 'bin' on the site, and share that bin with others. Then, you and your friends can all add and view links that you find interesting. My goal was to make this happen as simply as possible, so there are no user accounts, and there is a bookmarklet for adding links without having to go…
2011 · this.isby.us · its alternatives →
- 23MS
linkrdr (www.linkrdr.com), a personal link aggregator, was directly inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555923 I read while browsing on HN. It's still a bit rough, but the concept is an interesting one and people have already shown interest. Let me know what you think. Also, if anyone knows a good UX designer, email me :)
2012 · its alternatives →
- 24SS
Hey there HNers, First of all, apologies for the shameless "self-promotion" - just felt like sharing :-) I've just launched a very simple project on the e-commerce front and although I'm currently involved in a few "bigger and bolder" projects, decided to give this a go. It's a DIY e-commerce tool that allows people to setup stores on Facebook, for free. We started this project as a weekend hackathon to help a friend bring her products online and decided to turn it into a product, so there's still definitely a lot to be done. Apart from showing off, this thread is here to start a discussion…
2011 · getnovelo.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →