YHK - yet another hacker news clone

A/SIDE – Private photo sharing and encrypted messages

19 points eustoria 2 hours ago 23 comments

enahs-sf 1 hour ago | parent

Nice app. The hump of network effects is real but I hope someone can figure this out and liberate the masses from the scrolling.

virgil_disgr4ce 1 hour ago | parent

you realize that "the masses" don't give a shit, right? Everyone's grandparents are on facebook FOR the racist rightwing AI slop. I mean, unfortunately. I'd like to be wrong.

esafak 1 hour ago | parent

Then you can do it as a service; if you succeed that will mean fewer people doing that shit.

Jolter 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think you’d need the masses. They’ll be signing up one family group at a time. Tech savvy users will convince their parents to join for pics of the grandchildren - who’s gonna say no?

QuantumNomad_ 48 minutes ago | parent

> Tech savvy users will convince their parents to join for pics of the grandchildren - who’s gonna say no?

Eh I dunno. At the moment we are using a WhatsApp group chat. It works reliably and everyone is happy.

If I were to move our families to a different app I’m on the hook for any and all usability difficulties, instabilities, network connectivity issues etc etc. Even when the issue is their own internet, they are going to think that the app I made them switch to is the problem.

I have enough things to deal with already. I’ll stick with WhatsApp for the foreseeable future unless Meta does something sufficiently annoying or bad to really make me leave it. I already left Facebook many years ago and deleted the account completely I had there. I kept my Instagram but the last couple of years I’ve been less and less and less active there. I don’t even have the instagram app installed on my newest second hand phone. So I only check it once a week or so, from the previous phone.

virgil_disgr4ce 1 hour ago | parent

Vibe coding pro tip: your landing page sections do not need 300px y-margins

dofm 1 hour ago | parent

FWIW, narrow column widths with relatively fewer words per line provably improve readability.

Which this site needs because its marketing is Claude slop and is therefore operating under a readability penalty (not least because of typical AI small font, webkit-smoothing: antialiased, lowered contrast text.

Ugh.

djoldman 1 hour ago | parent

Looks like it's made by:

https://lab1908.com/

verdverm 30 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if they let the ai handle the encryption and if it hand-rolled it as they typically do

HelloUsername 1 hour ago | parent

App Store data linked to you:

Purchases

Contact Info

Contacts

User content

Identifiers

Usage Data

Jolter 1 hour ago | parent

Vibe coding pro tip: do not let the AI write the copy on your front page.

I’m not paying a dime for something that reads like slop. I’m assuming the engineering is to the same standards.

gonzalohm 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, exactly! If it reads that it took you 10 minutes to code then I'm not paying shit

jjbinx007 59 minutes ago | parent

There's a little box on there that says "No AI" which is pretty much meaningless. It implies it was written without AI but maybe it just means the product doesn't ship with an LLM?

Either way, it's a no from me.

Jolter 57 minutes ago | parent

I don’t know — the proof’s in the pudding but I’m not buying a slice to find out.

stephenpontes 40 minutes ago | parent

Regardless of the AI-tells on the homepage, if you check out the git repository, their most recent commits all happened within minutes of each other:

https://github.com/A-SIDE-Social/aside/commits/main/

- 8:14am - 8:15am - 8:36am - 8:37am

Not a red flag in and of itself, but considering the scope of each commit, my money is on _heavy_ vibe coding.

rustyhancock 39 minutes ago | parent

> The free history window limits access; it does not automatically delete older content.

This is mental you mean you keep hold of my photos and messages and I can only see them if I pay a subscription?

panja 20 minutes ago | parent

Yes I am assuming that is how they pay to run the service

spankalee 31 minutes ago | parent

I really believe that all new social apps like these should be built on AT Proto so that users have one account across apps, control over their data, and in this case, be able to use their photos in other apps (and not just via mobile OS media frameworks).

cherryteastain 25 minutes ago | parent

As long as Bluesky PBC control the DID and Appview you can be banned arbitrarily anyway.

raggi 23 minutes ago | parent

If did:web gets a rooting solution that isn’t dnssec maybe, until then nope.

mrtesthah 20 minutes ago | parent

No AI, except that it’s obvious this website HTML was generated entirely with AI.

HnUser12 19 minutes ago | parent

That doesn’t mean anything for the app having AI in it. Two completely different things.