microfeed
My name is Brad and I make tiny, nerdy web things out of words and code and images.
One of these tiny, nerdy things is a tool called microfeed which is -- simply -- a lightweight, personal, mobile-focused, social-media-style feed without all the heaviness of a nasty corporation or crazy billionaire running things behind the scenes.
I like the idea of social media but I wanted to build something where I still controlled the content: what people saw, the order, and if they could do so without an account. I don't care about likes or comments. All I wanted was a corner of the web to share my photos and links outside of the fray. It started pretty simple but through iterative improvements (and personally using it for over 6 months as I worked towards a version milestone) it has matured into a pretty cool version 1.
v1 features
familiar front end your friends with social accounts on the grams, bird sites, or books will find navigating the scrolling mobile interface easy-peasy and users can still cobble together simple profile pages
private your privacy-focused pals don't need an account and can see your content in comfort knowing that you're neither tracking them nor collecting personal info, and algorithms are not working in secret trying to sell them anything.
highly clickable from the profile images, to hashtags, links, carousel navigation and the images themselves, there is lots to explore and navigate and discover on the applet, and even you won't get bored flipping through your old posts and exploring the site you build just by posting pictures and thoughts.
highly linkable every post has it's own custom page with social graph metadata in the header, and each system user has a custom landing page feed with a clean URL to share, so you could always and easily repost on the social platforms what you've curated back here
metadata the system can build custom feeds around individual users or hashtags, letting you set up (as I've done) a user just for art posts or puppy posts, while still tagging content globally for topics, trips, or locations
back end controls system users can create, edit, publish, and remove posts that can have up to five carousel images each, links to other site, embedded youtube videos, hashtags, "meme-style" overlays, and timezone-based timestamp corrections
lot of flexibility adding posts and building content is image-first-focused, but system users can post just text too, or use the tool to promote links to other sites, even create a lightweight blog using the platform.
instances & forks
8r4d-stagram
you like social media but hate the companies running them? So do I so I mostly post my feeds here now. Works bestest on mobile.
nvl-grm
a micronovelling applet designed to publish flash fiction and microfiction
gamerdad
is a hidden sub-page of my photo feed (as above) but exclusively gaming screenshots
Note: some of these sites are hosted on a wee little server about the size of a deck of cards sitting in a cupboard in my basement. Occassionally things crash. Deal.