# content
When you start building your own social network, and you decide not to optimize for 'time spent', suddenly a lot of the features and design choices of current social media platforms become extremely questionable.

All these things that have been sold to us as “ease of use”, “staying up to date with your friends”, “For You”: they’re obviously not there for you. They're there to make you spend more time in the app and sell more ads. It's not quite a secret. "The user is the product" has been shouted from the rooftops for two decades now. But it does feel extra wrong when you start paying extra attention.

When creating touchgrass.network, the question often wasn't "what will it do", but rather "what won't it do". So: no algorithmic feed. No AI "For You" recommendations. No auto-play short-form video. No influencer culture. No public like counts. No infinite scroll. No outrage bubbles. No vendor lock-in. No need for link-in-bio. Every design choice that simply exists to feed the addiction: gone.

Instead, there's Friends, not Followers. Fine-grained post visibility settings with "circles". There's recommendations for books, movies, shows, music, podcasts, locations, by each of your individual friends, not by influencers, bubble-algorhithms or secret salesmen.

Things can still be fun. This isn't puritanism. There's themes and custom styling for your user profile, as a callback to the glory days of MySpace and Tumblr. Express yourself. Make your little corner of the internet feel like you again.

There are games, designed to actually have you connect with your friends, instead of with an AI. There are tiny tools to bring some joy back into the mundane: a life-trail habit tracker, a chore wheel to share tasks with roommates and partners.

And then there's interoperability. One hell of a word to say: what you made is yours. If you want to show it elsewhere on the open social web? We got you. If you want to move your stuff to another platform. We're not here to stop you. Never start from scratch again. Never let yourself be taken hostage by a platform again. Never let your online life turn into a sunk cost fallacy again.

When you build your own social network, you get to make those calls. You get to make it, for you. I highly recommend it.