About

Social Media Sandbox is my personal sandbox for feed and discovery UI for social media. It's a place where I try out different ways of browsing the same collection of photos and see how each one actually feels to use.

The collection of images is based off images pulled from curated are.na channels. Every image is embedded with CLIP and indexed in Postgres with pgvector. That is the only modification I allowed myself to give to the are.na data. This restriction allows me to reason about how to make presentation richer without forcing the user to add more to their posts.

The feed is the core of any social media platform. Masonry and Ambient are the same data shown two different ways, one switch away from each other on purpose so the differences are visible. Dynamic Graph is a third way to browse the same collection, reached from Search instead of that switch. It's built to keep growing: new browsing or discovery experiments get added over time.

The social-media framing is a starting point, not the endpoint. This project was first inspired by me learning a lot about Silk. In a podcast, Zane Kindness talks about how Silk started off as a tool for curators and only recently focused on becoming a social media platform. What these modes really are is tools for thinking with a collection. The lineage goes back to Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex, a hypothetical desk that let a researcher build associative trails between documents and walk them later.

Browsing by visual similarity, or searching by meaning instead of tags, is a small version of that idea: less a channel to consume and more an instrument for finding your way around a body of material. The sandbox is where I test which interfaces actually support that.

More information on the build can be found at the portfolio write-up: linpaul.com/portfolio/social-media-sandbox.