negativve: what I wanted instead of Instagram
For the last while I have been building negativve.com on the side. It is a community site for photographers and visual artists, and it is the place I wanted Instagram to be.
The short version: a chronological feed of work from the people you follow, no algorithm, no ads, no videos. You can run a 365, a 52-week, or any challenge you invent, and the site sends you reminders so the project actually accrues. Every photograph gets a permanent URL you can share with anyone, no login required. Camera, lens, aperture, shutter, and ISO log alongside the image. EXIF auto-fills from the file.
I made it because Instagram stopped being a place I wanted to post pictures. The feed is no longer the people I chose to follow. Photographs get squeezed into Reels formatting or buried under content I never asked for. Captions vanish. The whole environment is built to keep me scrolling, not to make me a better photographer or to help me find other people taking the craft seriously.
The design choices I cared about are pretty simple:
The feed is the people you follow, in the order they posted. That is it.
No likes as currency. No engagement bait. No promoted anything.
Challenges are first-class. Run a 365 or a 52-week or your own schedule, and the work accrues alongside everyone else's.
Technical metadata is part of the post, not buried in a panel nobody opens. The craft matters here. Descriptions are displayed at the forefront encouraging real discourse and essay based posting.
Every piece is permanent and shareable without a login wall. If I post a frame, I can send the link to my mom or to a magazine editor and they can just look at it.
Images are not postcard sized, they’re high quality and stored efficiently. I’m planning on perhaps allowing full res uploads with a small subscription to support storage cloud costs.
It is in active development. Challenges are live. There is a small group posting already, mostly photographers I know and a couple of family members who make pictures. Plenty is still missing. Plenty will change based on who shows up and what they need. I’m planning on adding a bunch of cool features that should be helpful for exploring and improving your art. I want negativve to be a place for you to find inspiration; not ads.
If any of this sounds like what you wanted out of a photo platform, the site is at negativve.com. Sign up is free. You can also look around without an account.
I will keep posting here as it develops: what I am building, what I am cutting, and what is happening on the site.