A/SIDE – Private photo sharing and encrypted messages

24 points by eustoria 18 hours ago on hackernews | 29 comments

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 | 17 hours ago

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 | 17 hours ago
Then you can do it as a service; if you succeed that will mean fewer people doing that shit.
: rightnutwingjob | 15 hours ago
Right.
And all the left wing grandparents are on Facebook to perv on the trans kids.
Get a grip fella.

Jolter | 17 hours ago

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_ | 16 hours ago
> 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 | 17 hours ago

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

: dofm | 16 hours ago
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 | 17 hours ago

Looks like it's made by:

https://lab1908.com/

verdverm | 16 hours ago

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

: flowerthoughts | 15 hours ago
It's AGPL [1], using manual double ratchet [2] for something and libsignal [3] for something.
[1] https://github.com/A-SIDE-Social/aside
[2] https://github.com/A-SIDE-Social/aside/blob/main/mobile/lib/...
[3] https://github.com/A-SIDE-Social/aside/blob/fce968549504af50...

HelloUsername | 17 hours ago

App Store data linked to you:

Purchases

Contact Info

Contacts

User content

Identifiers

Usage Data

: CreepyHunterX | 15 hours ago
New private messages are protected by end-to-end encryption (E2EE), but the ‘photo sharing’ in the name, isn’t. And A/SIDE stores the feed, so they can read it. The App Store label "User Content Linked to You" refers specifically to the feed, so there is no contradiction here. So the feature they named the product after is the one that isn't private.

Jolter | 17 hours ago

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 | 16 hours ago

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

jjbinx007 | 16 hours ago

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 | 16 hours ago
I don’t know — the proof’s in the pudding but I’m not buying a slice to find out.

stephenpontes | 16 hours ago

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 | 16 hours ago

> 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 | 16 hours ago
Yes I am assuming that is how they pay to run the service
: judge2020 | 15 hours ago
Side note but this statement (as in the statement from the website, not your comment) feels like it was written by Opus.
: Flavius | 15 hours ago
> you keep hold of my photos and messages and I can only see them if I pay a subscription?
Privacy 101. This is the best private photo sharing app on the market. (wink wink)
: onel | 8 hours ago
Should be on the mooseos store in a couple of days so you can self-host it. No need for lock in.

spankalee | 16 hours ago

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 | 16 hours ago
As long as Bluesky PBC control the DID and Appview you can be banned arbitrarily anyway.
: raggi | 16 hours ago
If did:web gets a rooting solution that isn’t dnssec maybe, until then nope.

mrtesthah | 16 hours ago

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

HnUser12 | 16 hours ago

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

: mrtesthah | 14 hours ago
If someone generated a website whole-cloth from an LLM, how can we trust anything on it?