# content
The moats for building non-shitty social networks are shrinking.

Most people already agree that Facebook has turned into an AI-slop hellhole. At the same time, Instagram, X, Threads, have their own sets of issues: politics, data-mining, ads, and where did your actual friends go?

There's always been two massive moats keeping those platforms alive: they have the people, and it's nearly impossible to create something *everyone* will love.

But the cost and time of programming, of what in essence are fairly simple features, has gone down so much that the era of 'bespoke social media' has arrived. Don't like it? Build it yourself. Don't want to build? Find the closest fit in the forest of well-meaning startups.

The other moat has been even more difficult to close, but it's happening. Thanks to open protocols like ActivityPub ("the Fediverse") and ATProto ("the Atmosphere"), a user can now basically take their account, their content, their contacts, wherever they want, within the open social web. They can see the same posts by the same people, just in a different interface.

If you like the global townsquare and discovering new people and ideas? Mastodon and Bluesky are definitely a good fit. "Control the algorithm" is already a much better model than "we'll show you what you like". If you're all about the visual: Pixelfed and Flashes are proper Instagram alternatives.

What I was looking for, might have been a bit *too* niche, though. A friends-first, turn your profile into your calling card, no (auto-play/shortform) video, go outside and live your life-encouraging, anti-phone-addiction kind of social media interface.

So I followed my own advice and created one. https://touchgrass.network. You don't need a new account if you already have a Fediverse or Atmosphere account. You can keep following the same people, and they can keep following you from their own Mastodon, Bluesky, Flashes, Pixelfed, ... interface. But being on Touchgrass feels more like old-Facebook, than current-X or Instagram.

There really is no excuse anymore to keep that stale Facebook-account around, or to hate yourself after wasting hours of scrolling Reels.

And when it's time to move on, just take everything you created, and move it to the next shiny thing.

+++

What I'm looking for? People with an account in the Fediverse, the Atmosphere, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Flashes: drop me your handle, so we can be friends over on the good part of the social web.

People who want to see what I'm trying to make here: create or link your account at touchgrass.network, or people who want to follow my dog and garden photo's, favorite books and tv shows: find my profile at niels.touchgrass.network. You can just subscribe via e-mail or RSS too (old-skool!).

Beta-testers and code inspectors: come check it out and break things. (Especially people with Solid POD experience.) Source code is at tangled.org/niels.touchgrass.network/touchgrass-open, under a AGPL 3.0 open source license.

+++

I'll share more about the specific choices I made, but this post has been going on long enough. It's interesting, though, what you notice and what you decide on, when you're not optimizing for 'time spent' (or 'time wasted and ads sold'), but the exact opposite.