I've noticed for the last few years it feels like everyone has been saying the same thing, that social media got baaad, timelines feel hostile, nothing you see is actually from people you chose to follow, and every platform seems optimized for outrage, screenshots, and engagement bait rather than the original microblog ideas of the early 2010s
I miss the 2010 social styles, where you have to share your @name with a friend IRL because search wasn't really search... A place where you followed people, saw what they wrote, stumbled into interesting discussions, and hashtags meant something because the people using them actually belonged there.
So I built meepr this weekend. I've been thinking about it daily for over year now, so I finally did it.
At the surface it looks very boring on purpose. Short posts. Replies. Follows. No quote dunking. No infinite algorithmic feed. Your main timeline is just people you follow, in order.
On meepr, hashtags act more like rooms than magnets for spam. If you browse a tag, you don’t see everyone on the internet trying to hijack it. You see people who actually talk about that thing, consistently, over time. You can't access a hash tag globally till you've used it a bunch, or at least discussed the topic the hashtag is about.. So, local tags feel local. Topic tags feel like real communities instead of drive by hot takes.
There is no trending tab. No engagement bait incentives. No rage sorting. You don’t get pushed content because it’s “performing well,” you get pulled into conversations because YOU find them.
This is very much an experiment. It’s small, opinionated, and probably not for everyone. It's also currently running on a tiny VM that I devops'd myself so it might crash. If people like and use it, i'll make it $3/mth to cover the infra + prevent bots.