I wanted old school social media back. Actual connections with friends. Not pity likes and performances and highlight reels.

All my friends have stopped posting. Everyone's a lurker now. I'm a lurker. The only time I see what anyone's doing is when it's a humblebrag. I have no idea what's actually going on in my friends' lives besides the ones I see every week or so.

So I built touch grass. You post once a week: 3 easy questions, max 3 photos. Sunday 6pm mountain time (yeah its my time zone) everyone's posts unlock at the same time. You catch up on what your people have been doing, then close the app. No likes, no comments, no algorithm, no advertisers, no bullshit, besides that one friend maybe.

It's not about content. It's about keeping the connection warm. I see my friend went to the Cowboys game (Texans represent), I text him and ask how it was. That's it. That's the whole point. A reason to actually reach out.

I've weirdly learned more about my parents in the last 5 weeks than the last year it feels like. I get real answers, not performances. It's honestly my favorite thing right now but I built it so I guess that means I'm biased.

When someone asks me "what'd you do this week?", usually I have no idea or at least it takes me a little while. But when I sit down to post, I actually think about it. And my friends see the real stuff, not a curated highlight reel.

The tech: I'm a solo dev. I wanted this to actually survive for years, not die when I couldn't afford the AWS bill. So I needed it cheap. Really cheap. That's when I thought about old school social media. We were using terrible flip phones and marginally good digital cameras, but everyone wanted to be tagged in their photos on Facebook. So I thought using a polaroid filter would be a great way to save some money. Everyone looks good in a polaroid, the warm tones, the grain, the vignette. People steal them from my house, those bastards. It plays into the old school social media vibe perfectly. But here's the thing: it also gave me permission to compress the hell out of every image. 600px, 70% quality, webp. Each photo comes out to sub 40kb, sometimes as little as 10kb, instead of 2mb. The aesthetic hides the compression, but honestly everyone just thinks it works. From the limited data I've gotten.

The whole thing runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2. Cloudflare is legit the best thing on this planet in my opinion. It's about $5/month for the paid workers but the key is R2 egress, it's also free. Every time someone loads a photo, I pay nothing. On AWS that would be $0.09/GB and I'd be dead. At 10k users loading feeds every Sunday, that's the difference between $0 and $50+/month just in bandwidth. At 100k or 1MM it would start to be too much but on Cloudflare it's quite affordable.

I can run a photo-sharing social network for the cost of a beer or maybe 3 overpriced donuts. That's the only reason this is possible without funding.

I literally just launched a couple of weeks ago with a couple of friends and now I'm at ~150 users right now. I honestly have no idea where some of these users are coming from, that part has been pretty fun. The new year felt like the right time to share, everyone's thinking about screen time and staying connected. This is hopefully my answer to both.

Its free, there's no ads, and I don't sell any data. Honestly who would be buying it. I would love to hear any feedback. It is not perfect by any means but its the most polished thing I've built for the web.

Thanks for reading.

screenshots: https://trytotouchgrass.com/hn mainpage: https://trytotouchgrass.com

user:	funkify
created:	November 19, 2021
karma:	7
about:	anywhere between tech & activism.