Show HN: Dygres – The privacy focused social media without ads and algorithms

[drpiratecaptain]

Hey Hacker News, excited to reveal the alpha for dygres! The no nonsense, 100% free to use social media aimed at protecting your data and elevating the way we see online communication.

Having been a social media user since the myspace days, I had become disillusioned with how far social media has strayed away from communicating and how much it has gravitated towards advertising, pushing agendas, misinformation and silencing critics.

My goal with dygres is to build a social media that operates on its own global independent network, where users are in total control of their data, the content they see and are compensated for the content they create among many other yet to be revealed features.

Some of the planned features for dygres:

Designed with distributed governance in mind so that the userbase plays an active role in the platforms evolution and management.

With no algorithms in play, the userbase effectively decides what rises to the top and what fades into obscurity. This makes trending content a natural response to the collectives emotions, likes and dislikes. This also ensures that true creativity and originality is now rewarded rather than obscured in favor of likeness based on an algorithmic evaluation of what's trending or consumed.

A tiered verification system ensures any content you see weeds out bad actors and fake accounts. Built in checks that trigger at certain account milestones ensure that the verification isn't a one and done deal.

A natural lifecycle for every post to prevent any horse beating.

No advertisers means we do not collect or sell your data to any third parties. In fact you can delete your account at any time which erases your existence from the platform. The ad free nature of the platform helps maintain a focus on user generated content freeing you from distractions and a need to be constantly reminded to buy something.

To celebrate the launch of this alpha, I have added a small feature that is in a very early stage. Internally its called "yggdrasil". Every user gets a sign up link that they can share and successful sign ups add to a tree. Overtime this feature will develop and sign ups will form a picture of of the online user base. Hopefully it works at scale .

My link to sign up to dygres: https://dygres.com/share/drpiratecaptain

The journey for dygres is a long one but this alpha has been a long time in the making and rather than seek perfection, I am moving to seek as much feedback as possible at this early stage so that future development is guided by user input rather than the beliefs and opinions of a small group of people.

On a final note, I just want to say that I know the platform is very bare bones and lacks a lot of the features that the biggest platforms have at the moment. This however is a completely bootstrapped platform built with the dev support of a very small team so please forgive the very spartan nature of the build. A roadmap exists to evolve the platform further and introduce features that will take the user experience to the next level.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and checking out dygres.

[samson-delilah]

Hey! This is cool, I like the idea of a supporting a social network via awards/trophies. Curious how you're thinking of positioning this vs. say, Mastodon or Bluesky? (or Ello, etc.)

Also, if I understand correctly, it's supposed to be a remix of Reddit + Twitter ideas?

[drpiratecaptain]

Hello!

Thanks for checking out the alpha. I am a little excited for my first query on this so bear with me.

In terms of positioning this is not meant to compete with any of the existing social platforms but it offers a set of unique features that set it apart from what exists, like distributed governance, constant verification of accounts and content, no ads means no noise and on top of that the way I have envisioned this and the way the roadmap is being worked on, relies on the platform establishing its own global independent network accessible to anyone on the planet. Think of it like a second internet but solely dedicated for (verified) human to human communication. The platform will run two versions, one that runs on regular old internet and a second that stays active if access to the primary network is hindered for any reason (you can hop on either). No other platform offers this nor do they want to because it is an extremely ambitious undertaking.

If I was to sum up the purpose of dygres: Provide access to unlimited communication to anyone on the planet with or without internet access and enable them to make a true living off the platform then hand every verified user voting rights.

Bonus: Add a use case scenario for cryptocurrency.

Per your second query, the MVP is a spartan build because of budget and dev constraints so for now it mimics the functionality of existing platforms for familiarities sake. My approach for this stemmed from my need to understand web development and test my initial thesis of building an MVP and then iterating from there. Future versions of dygres will not look or function the way the alpha does as there will be layers that will allow granular control of the way content is published whether its informative or general entertainment. This granular control will also allow you to create what I think will be the most valuable following on any platform that exists.