Five Interesting Indie Platforms You Might Not Have Heard Of · brennan.day

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'Colorful buildings of the historical village of La Vila Joiosa, Alicante, Spain in 2022 January' taken by Simo Räsänen | Wikimedia Commons (edited by the Author)

It's already been almost a month (how??) since I deleted all my corporate social media accounts. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, among others. And as a result I've found myself looking at other social platforms and communities to fill my time with.

Because social media is not inherently bad—it only starts becoming bad when multi-billion dollar businesses are created around using people as products and extracting as much information and value as possible out of every single one of them.

Now, I'm also a bit of a maximalist—that's one of the reasons I kept my corporate social media accounts for so long. I love being everywhere, trying out everything, and having a big-tent mindset.

So I already have a fair share of communities I'm already in. Of course I'm active on Mastodon and Bluesky. And there's omg.lol, of course. And also forums I browse often like 32-bit Café and Melonland. Then there's the tildeverse, which is extremely fun and a great way to get more comfortable and familiar with terminal. And the IndieWeb Wiki has many frequently occurring Homebrew Website Club meetups which I need to attend more often.

But in the past couple weeks, I've stumbled upon and discovered even more niche websites that I thought I'd share. I don't think a few would be properly defined as "social media" platforms, but they're online digital communities of people nonetheless!

And because of my big-tent mindset, I'm certainly not afraid to share these places openly and have new people join—if a platform is interested on hiding away from people and practicing gatekeeping, then I'm certainly not interested in it. (All of these platforms are also genAI-free, as far as I can tell.)

I also want to note that I've only discovered these platforms myself recently, so I still am green and don't know that much about them. If any of my readers are users, please share!

With all that out of the way, let me begin my list.

1. Special Fish

special.fish describes itself as a "community word processor with light social features," which is a description I adore. It has a stark brutalist web design which I also really dig. It's been running since February 2, 2020.

Built and maintained by a solo working artist based in St. Johns, Oregon, special fish is funded directly by its users instead of ads or investment. This means there is an upfront payment required to make an account. The directory page lists a suggested $40/year contribution, with paying members effectively subsidizing users who can't.

The main content area of the platform is called the Garden, where user pages sit, loosely linked together. There are journal entries, poem drafts, food logs, and open questions posted to the whole community. There's also a bulletin where you can share open calls, events, projects, or a new website. Every Sunday morning, there's a collaborative writing room.

According to the about page, "communities" were originally just called "places" in the site's early design. (and there's an easter-egg DJ feature built into the platform?) Registration requires users to be 18 or older, and the terms page states the site could shut down at any point if it becomes too costly to run, that backups are made only "occasionally." New accounts go through the join page.

2. Ctrl + Shift + 3

ctrlshift3.com describes itself as "a calm, chronological, text-first community platform" built by a single developer, Billy Wilcosky. It's minimalist in its design, as you'd expect.

There are no likes, follows, or other vanity counts. Instead, there's just a shared Feed in chronological order, with an optional "Wave" view that surfaces posts with more comments while still favoring newer content and adding light randomization.

Private, invite-only groups are called "Clicks", and users can privately subscribe ("Sub") to each other without visible follower counts. Comments are flat rather than nested, and related posts can be manually linked together as "connected thoughts." You can add posts that are either plain text, timed polls (1–30 days), or a 40×40 pixel-art grid. There's also a site-wide Polling Place for community-level questions, and an experimental feature called Direct Connect that offers ephemeral, browser-to-browser chat over WebRTC, with no history saved once the session ends.

Participation is tracked through a system called "Bits," which awards a symbol for each post, comment, or daily login, with different symbols and colours at milestone counts (10th, 50th, 100th, 10,000th). The platform has a released iOS app (with acknowledged bugs...