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Comment by DanielleMolloy | Hacker News Reader

Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting)

When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did not look as if it would close shop within two years.

Looked again recently and it still seems to be the only platform filling that overall „niche“. Also it has a clean and good user interface, and is customizable to the point of changing the HTML. I hope they can save or otherwise sustain it.

Other social media attempts to constantly distract and emotionalize me to keep me hooked. Looking at a good art or photography Tumblr feels like relief now honestly.

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https://cohost.org/ ?

Edit for a bit of info: There is no discovery mechanism built-in and no "algorithm". The way to find more posts on a topic is to use hashtags. Everything is reverse-chronological. If someone wants their post to have broader engagement, they will post with "#The Cohost Global Feed" or some broad topic. You can go browse if you want to, but the site isn't going to push anything on you (besides following the site admins lol).

Cohost doesn't have full-text search built-in, but Google actually has it covered. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=is%20piss%20a%20vegeta...

Cool find! I'm trying to post a content-focused side project in as many grassroots platforms as I can. My main site is already in Neocities, for example. I think I could work with this too!

That said, I wish they featured some random pages or categories from their homepage. I'd like to see what communities already exist around the topic of my project.

Hmm not bad, though having to do 4 "pick the land vehicles from 4-bit images" was super annoying!

fwiw I got onto cohost a few months ago and have really enjoyed it.

Because it's a smaller community with no "algorithm" intentional discovery actually happens. I use hashtags to find stuff, and other people have found my stuff via hashtags! I only started sharing online this year and so that second bit is huge - it's night and day between twitter and cohost[1].

The site actively tries to avoid the status games that other social networks play. You can't see follower counts or like counts (including your own) and instead get notifications like "several folks liked this" (with a list of who did). There's no easy way to answer "how big is this person's following" when looking at their profile.

I think this adds up to a site that feels more like a community. Comments are typically either nice/encouraging or interesting and folks comment a lot. It's easy to find cool posts. Not having metrics is freeing. Many of the folks that post are there to share the cool things that they do.

It's not a replacement for twitter, but it's easily the site that I'm the most excited to share stuff on - especially early WIP stuff (I shared something fun last night!)

[1]I shared an early version of Flappy Dird[2] on cohost and got some real engagement and it felt great. Flappy Dird ended up doing pretty well on HN; I doubt I would have polished it as much without the early cohost support.

[2] https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-11-flappy-bird-finder/

Wordpress can be quite close to the aesthetic of tumblr. One blog post per event, with pictures and text in whatever form you want.

You will have to pay for it though.

Tumblr hasn't been primarily about your styled hosted "x.tumblr.com" site for a long time. Most users hang out on the dashboard and don't really expect non-Tumblr users to be visiting their blog. It's a lot closer to Twitter than a blog these days.

Pixelfed is trying to be a federated version of Instagram, with the generally pro-user design that goes along with it that goes along with that.

See https://conntects.net

It's a free alpha. The finished product will be paid (but cheap) for those who want to post.

But it's not for porn if that's the sort of photos you want to post.

google photos share gallery?

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