About ShareSphere

ShareSphere is the place to exchange with other people about your hobbies, art, news, jokes and many more topics. ShareSphere is a non-profit, ad-free, open source website with a focus on transparency, privacy and community empowerment. ShareSphere's goal is to run by relying solely on donations and to provide a better user experience than ad-based platforms.

Rules & Moderation

ShareSphere aims to be a place for positive and constructive exchanges. In order to make it so, abase set of rules needs to be respected site-wide. Communities can define additional rules to define what content is appropriate and how users should behave.

Planned Improvements

Time filters
Private messages
Additional moderation tools
Memberships - users can become contributors that get access to additional features
Private communities

Origin & Goals

I started thinking about ShareSphere around summer 2023 after several social media platforms I used made changes with a negative impacts on their user base. I already had quite a low opinion of most social networks, thinking they were pretty terrible for the mental health of many of their users and that their ad-based profit model is fundamentally incompatible with a good user experience.

This gave me the idea to try building a better platform, one that would non-profit, rely on donations instead of ads and would be focus on transparency. Being non-profit and relying on donations is extremely important, as it switches the company's focus from making users mindlessly scroll through content to generate more ad-revenue to providing a great user experience that want to contribute to with donations. Furthermore, not relying on ads means there is a much greater incentive to deal with bots, as inflating the number of users and generated content becomes less relevant.

In such a structure, transparency is key, to show users that their donations are not misused. ShareSphere will always report how much donations it received and how this money is used, for instance for operating costs and salaries. ShareSphere is also open source, enabling the community to know how the site functions and which information is collected. Finally, ShareSphere aims to have transparent moderation, without shadow bans or unexplained content removal.

Another long term goal of ShareSphere is to give more control to the communities, by enabling them to select their moderators, define their rules and leverage their help to deal with bots and bad actors. This is a long term idea and its implementation is not yet defined but the basic idea is to have a vote based system that gives more weight to strong and regular contributors of each community to avoid communities being hijacked.

ShareSphere is still in its beginnings and additional features will come in the future, such as direct messages, better moderation tools, additional filters and configuration and many more. I hope you enjoy ShareSphere and will help us grow into the best possible platform.

Welcome to ShareSphere!

ShareSphere is the place to exchange with other people about your hobbies, news, art, jokes and many more topics.

ShareSphere is a non-profit, add-free, open source website with a focus on transparency, privacy and community empowerment. You can find more information on the website and its rules below.

Treat all members of the community with respect. Healthy debate and differing opinions are welcome, but personal attacks, insults, or hostile behavior will not be tolerated. Always aim to contribute constructively and make ShareSphere a space where everyone feels safe to participate.

Post in the appropriate communities and follow their rules. Make sure to use accurate titles, tags, and categories to help others understand the topic of your post. Stay on-topic and contribute in good faith on topics where you have a genuine interest - this helps keep communities organized, relevant, and welcoming for everyone.

Furthermore, mature content that is not suitable for children (sexually explicit, graphic, violent or offensive) and spoilers must be labelled as NSFW and Spoilers respectively. You can find more details in our Content Policy.

Any illegal content, content advocating or soliciting illegal acts or transactions and malicious content that aims to cause harm or negatively impact other users is strictly prohibited. More detail can be found in our Content Policy.

Violating this rule will lead to immediate removal of content and a permanent ban. Depending on the infraction, it can also be reported to authorities.

Do not engage in any activity that harms, disrupts, or undermines the platform or its users. This includes (but is not limited to) inserting malicious code, exploiting bugs, evading bans, bypassing security measures, or helping others do so. Do not attempt to deceive users, manipulating votes or reputation systems, or make the site harder to use through spam, flooding, or disruptive behavior. Keep the platform safe, fair, and accessible for everyone.