Pieces – Social network for people

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• Hacker News
• The site has an elegant design and exudes a calming, inviting atmosphere.

  I came across a line in the Social Contract that caught my attention: “The platforms that dominate today have drifted from their original promise. Feeds are flooded with content from accounts no one follows.”

  I respectfully disagree with that. IMO the problem lies in the opposite direction. The content we see on these sites is driven by algorithms that reward popular posts and influencers. This creates a system of “stars” and “fans,” which does not foster genuine connections.

  The original internet promised to give equal voices to all and allow users to see things they might otherwise miss. When I encounter a new social network like yours, especially one as elegant as this, I secretly hope it will restore that original promise.

  by zhxiaoliang
• Best of luck!
  by sghiassy
• Thank you! Appreciate it.
  by domo__knows
• I’ve seen a few posts about a “better social network” tried a few even thought about making my own.

  It seems hard to get them off the ground.

  I wonder if the answer to the enshittification of social networks is “no social network at all”.

  by andrewstuart
• 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

  by domo__knows
• How do we know this social network will not enshittify?

  The only social network that hasn't enshittified is most likely Mastodon.

  Why isn't this social network open source?

  > PIECES is a product created by a for-profit company, and we are not anti-advertising.

  Advertising IS a form of enshittification.

  It is the same model of almost every social network.

  by colesantiago
• 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.

  by domo__knows
• Haha love the video link!

  Would you consider continuing this as a non-profit?

  by sherryf123
• 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.
  by domo__knows
• Is this site inclusive of nonhuman identities? [0]

  It seems incredibly focused on "real humans" etc, which is (common...), but my real identity doesn't exist in the physical world.

  (There are also multiple of them thanks to DID, but that tends to require a significant rearchitecture to accommodate)

  [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

  by LoganDark
• 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.

  by domo__knows
• Do you have some sort of detection for 'faceless accounts' ? Or are you moderating that by hand?

  I like the idea, but how do you actually enforce the 'no bots' model?

  by dpoloncsak
• 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

  by domo__knows
• Neither open source nor federated? Why would we takes steps backwards in this way?
  by singpolyma3
• I want a distributed social network on top of email. Emails don’t have to be human readable. A client could be built to pass and share posts among a network via email messages. Add some clever cryptography and you can build trust networks and keep out spam more reliably.
  by macinjosh
• The problems with social networks is pretty widely understood. Simply acknowledging them as problems, with a promise to tackle, is not enough to attract people imo. It would help to go into detail how exactly you propose to solve them, what is it you would do different where others have tried and failed?
  by potamic
• How do you plan to stop the social contract being changed by some successor or if you get bought out? Google was all "don't be evil" until they became evil. Not really sure of a good answer to that, other than perhaps having each user buy-in to become a shareholder, and even then, don't know if that would prevent this situation.
  by askvictor
• Interesting idea, but I'm pessimistic about spawning any type of social media. I feel like a few of these types of sites start with good intentions, but eventually devolve into yet another metric to generate clout or revenue. Merely supporting advertising on such a platform already opens the door to the same problem that every other social media company has.
  by benonsocial
• Good work. I signed up @joelparkerhenderson. It's unclear to me how to start using Pieces because the site says I'm awaiting approvals.

  I understand the point of that for unknown accounts; perhaps you could consider faster FTUX by leveraging my other existing social accounts? E.g. GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. And/or enable me to browse public accounts or example content in the meantime?

  by jph
• The software is really well-made.

  I wonder why you change the links from the internal ones to this format https://piecesof.me/p/5b2w8x6sn2mwkdhppfusvqsf8z5h1t ?

  The writing is quite nice. I don't understand the "Docs". And I'd suggest to make it very easy to write my first post. The big editor is a bit scary.

  also here: https://piecesof.me/videos - where do I get prompted to upload my own video?

  Anyway, good luck! Let's see how long I can stick around.

  by tillcarlos
• 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.

  by domo__knows
• Do you have any plans to support Ultra HDR images, on the Android app and/or other platforms? I did some browsing of the site and didn't see any examples (but that doesn't mean it's unsupported).

  I really enjoy that aspect for sharing photography on Instagram, and the support (at the client level, at least) is fairly straightforward (see https://developer.android.com/media/grow/ultra-hdr/display).

  The idea of the platform does sound great, and the application seems very polished from what I can tell so far.

  by kcoppock
• 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.

  by domo__knows
• Good work! I am hopeful for a social network that is not craving to increase engagement and going viral. I posted a sample but and created a profile.

  But when I went to the Docs tab in my profile, it says...

  Doc Not Found The doc "how-to-use-pieces" could not be found

  by annjose
• 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.

  by domo__knows
• I like the idea at a social level/product level, but at this point I don't think I'd use any social network that wasn't open at a protocol level in some way. ATProto/etc would be a great tech backbone for this, and would then let users self host their content, it would let orgs run their own views, it would let archivers archive content for posterity, it would open the door to possible federation in ways that suited the network in the future. Re-inventing all of that from scratch would be a terrible idea, and would lose focus.
  by danpalmer
• I get it, but form follows finance — show me how piecesof.me sustains itself and I'll tell you what kind of promises they can actually make. Lots of naive optimism out there with these types of projects.
  by gavindo
• Watch me ;)
  by domo__knows
• - i see a 100 social networks advertised daily on reddit, HN etc

  - the biggest challenge you are facing is overcoming the double network effect

  - in order for any of em to take off, you need to get me and my friends and their friends and so on

  - one way to do this is to start a social network only for a small niche. could be anything. startups only! designers only etc and scale it up one category at a time to let the network effects come into the picture

  - that is how you build a social media with 1M+ users

  by vivzkestrel
• 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.

  by domo__knows