Show HN: Pieces – Social network for people (try.piecesof.me)
Hey HN, long time lurker first time poster. I built a social network called PIECES. After building a private blog last year after I had to get off IG and Substack, I decided to productize it. It's here now. It has a dedicated web experience + iOS/Android.
Would love if you tried it out!
38 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadI like the idea, but how do you actually enforce the 'no bots' model?
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”.
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
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.
If you want people to see it as a different thing, it needs to be a different thing.
IMO The Social Contract that we publish is a step in the right direction. If you're on IG and you look at your feed in 2018 vs 2026, you can tell that something has changed dramatically but there is nothing in writing about what IG promised in 2018 vs what they do in 2026. It's all by feel. If they published it, IG users would be able to point out every promise kept and broken.
In the future, perhaps members can sign contracts like sports stars who agree with their club to have ABC terms for XYZ years. But this is where we're starting and I'm happy to get feedback from our members on how to better assure them in future versions of The Social Contract.
> You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can't go anywhere in Myspace, you can't organize in Myspace, you can't make money in Myspace.
> You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That's a favela. It's made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it's made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks.
> You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!
> You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum.
— Bruce Sterling
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.
Since you've actually started a social media site, I wonder if you have any insight on that? You say you believe in this project; what is it that you think is valuable about letting everyone talk to everyone, as opposed to exclusive and curated spaces for people that semi-self-select based on community interests and values, like forums? Separately, why do you think that removing organizations/brands and psuedo users is going to be the crux of the solution?
Honestly looking to have my mind changed. But mostly just curious.
I'll say this: when you log into one of the incumbent social networks like IG/X/SnapChat/Facebook and you see a post that you don't care at all to see, why are you seeing that? It's because they want you to see it. They think that this post with this content and these reactions has the highest chance of making you engage with it and see more ads. The best example of this is navigating reddit.com vs old.reddit.com. The fancier reddit.com always recommends me stuff that I don't really care about but end up clicking through on because I am weak and they know I am weak. old.reddit.com is closer to the old internet that I enjoy: I check in on topics/subreddits I'm interested in and then when nothing is new or interesting, I do other things.
Arguably, building a platform that's less addictive is foolish and leaving money on the table. But as someone who had to quit IG for 2 years (though I'm back on it now) I really don't want to sell people a digital drug addiction. I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career?
To answer your question more directly, the internet has given me a lot. One of the reasons I'm so into soccer/football is because following the /r/soccer subreddit taught me about the sport and after browsing on/off for a couple of years I can tell you all the big storylines. I never in a million years would've been a football fan if it weren't for the subreddit. I've picked up hobbies like shuffling to house music by following various shufflers on IG. I keep in touch with friends from middle school who, if I grew up in earlier decades, I would've lost contact with a long, long time ago. All because of social media.
The internet can be a great place when the platforms themselves allow us to control our attention. I'm optimistic about PIECES and the other platforms we're building. I want people to feel connected to other people. Is there anything more important than that?
The problem is that way back when, circa 2005, all these places were kind nerd, and at that point in time being a nerd was still not something to be proud of, so for most people "the internet" was MSN and Fotolog, and today's internet for most of this cohort is still just an evolution of that stuff (Whatsapp and Facebook), and the newer generation didnt even get to know what the forum-scene was...
So anything people produce today, is either a replacement for nerd forums, which does not need replacement, or the social media that as crappy as it is, just works... The only new social media that is thriving is copies of other platforms that have become too much of an echo chamber to bare, so now we need another echo chamber but one for the other 50%.
I think that's why we see so many riffs on social media, people trying to make a breakthrough on things like, decentralized, more secure, less moderated, more moderated, crypto, paid, X-only, etc
And the reality is that nobody that is hooked, or cares about social media gives a shit about any of that, they want the feed, the masses want what they already have, and everybody else is just looking to be the next vBulletin watercooler reinvention.
Facebook overall is a pox on humanity. Private Facebook groups, however, can be genuinely useful. I spend a lot of time in one topic-specific Facebook group (and as little time on wider Facebook as I can manage)
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.
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.
- 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
I don't know if alternative social media can ever scale as large as Reddit. Tildes.net and Lemmy both have similar activity to Hacker News and I'd consider them both "successful."
The truth is that Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc are not websites used to drive connections between human beings; they're media machines meant to create ad distribution channels. And that's what users want.
When someone uses Instagram, they don't want to see their friends vacation photos - they want to see Cardi Bs latest post. Meta attaches ads to that interaction and that's how they drive revenue.
When someone uses Reddit, they aren't seeing what their neighbor has to say - they're consuming a long flowing rage bait story or a web comic. Sure, there are smaller, niche communities but that isn't the bulk of the site traffic.
And, honestly, content is addictive. I'm personally not on Reddit to make friends or deepen my connection with other humans. I'm there to scroll through memes and cat pictures.
I think that smaller social media sites fail because they don't emphasize media generation and distribution. That reframing still presents difficult problems to solve but I feel like that simple perspective pivot helps with growth. Like, if you wanted to take the "OG" Reddit approach to bootstrapping a social media site you could just programatically generate massive amounts of fake content. Rage bait stories, product placement, etc. Just firehose as much media to drive engagement until you get actual human beings to take part.
That is is growth is what you want. It's arguable whether hyperscaled social media platforms actually make society better or individuals happier.
Would you consider continuing this as a non-profit?
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
Thanks for trying it out though and I hope to see you on the platform.
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?
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.
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.