Show HN: Digital scarcity; app where photos gradually decay with time / views
joinfaded.comLike instagram, but all photos have a shelf life: they can be up for year, an hour or ten minutes, or up until they're viewed 100 times, 1000 times or a million times, etc.
The longer they're up, the more they fade - user chosen filters are applied gradually over the lifetime of the photo (be it measured in clicks or time), gradually obscuring it. At the end of its lifetime, the pictures faded / expired, and disappears, though comments remain.
This is a fun side project of mine, An experiment in digital persistence and scarcity. And, yes its vibe coded, built on replit.
Currently just a responsive web page (desktop, and works great on iOS devices, which I have). Native apps for android and iOS to follow should interest and time permit!
You can also experiment with the different fading techniques without joining, available here:
Many of the fades are public already and work well, my ahab and the whale is the "aging" fade which has proven hard to nail
I think an aging is going to be a non-linear (not in time, but in brightness application) fade to an off white and de-contrasting add addition of grains (not white noise, but bigger grains/dust). What's hard about this is there's some threshold of believability. Real photos age surprisingly well even when very sun bleached, staying pretty visible right till the end. You want slow degradation that does actually remove some of the photo each time, from what I can tell. You might be able to get away with a literal dust layer on top for that though.
Yeah - the aging filter is really tough. I'll keep playing around with it, and added some others in the meantime.
I really like inkbleed, that looks really good!
It would be cool if added photos state on each timeline until it faded