Seam Social: Remix the Internet
Hi, and welcome to Seam! With the announcement of our seed round of funding today, this the time to introduce ourselves, tell you about what we’re building now, and our vision for the future of social media. Seam allows users to code, design, and curate their perfect social spaces. Ultimately, we create online experiences to foster whimsical relationships with your closest friends.
The State of Social Media Today
In order to understand where Seam is going, we first have to start with where we are today. My name is Nick, the founder of Seam, and prior to starting Seam, I spent 5 years at Meta. I’ve always loved building creative tools — from the beginning of my Facebook days on the Groups team in 2016, building the Music sticker on Facebook Stories, to building new social networks on the New Product Experimentation team. Each project was an attempt to help people express themselves online. Through these experiences, I started to notice a pattern about why social media has been the same for the past decade. There are two trends that drive all social media today: the ads based business model, and context collapse on our social graphs.
This led me ask myself the question: what if you & your friends could be the architects of your own online social spaces? Bringing it back to a personal blog and GeoCities era of the internet — except this time, we now have true digital property primitives by storing creative attribution on-chain.
Rather than the next social network being built by the company top down, as it needed to be to support an ads-based business model, we have the opportunity to build it bottom up from contributions from our users, molded from their own community needs and desires of their groupchats.
Introducing Seam: Build, Design & Curate
Seam is a community-developed social media platform to code, design, and curate your perfect social spaces. You can make new pages filled with anything from around the internet, from profiles for yourself or moodboards for your favorite things. Seam aims to bring back a user-owned era of the Internet, focused on whimsical and zany user expression, rather than impersonal newsfeeds. By using mini-apps to drop content into curated social spaces and web pages, Seam is making social media personal again.
Seam’s Mini-Apps
The core of Seam’s online revolution is our mini apps. Mini-apps create the posts you write on your friends walls, and the blocks you use to customize your profile.
Eventually, these mini-apps grow in complexity and become entire social experiences. Mini-apps will initially start by looking like toys: they will be ways to share photos, music, videos and notes, or minigames to play with your friends. But as the community matures and the pool of talented remixers grows, they will increasingly become a force for disruptive innovation.
In addition, Seam’s mini-apps pioneer a new business model for social media. Rather than making money by selling advertising and collecting user data, Seam hosts a marketplace of user-created mini-apps, themes, and templates. Users earn Seam Points and then spend them on profile customizations by unlocking the mini-apps made by their friends.
If you’re interested in the technical details, become a block developer today! Mini-apps are React components, written in Javascript. Mini-apps live inside of Seam as plugins, meaning that they don’t need to request API access. This way, there’s no possibility of user data leaking into block developers hands, and y’all can get started building for Seam permissionlessly, without us having to issue API keys.
The Future Creative Renaissance
Learning to code doesn’t have to be a chore. Building new stuff online doesn’t require a degree, it only requires insatiable curiosity and a desire to create. Just like the early internet, when anyone could write a little bit of HTML to spice up their MySpace or Tumblr profile (shoutout to the NeoPets HTML guide!), Seam’s mini-apps aspire to be the place where you write your first line of code.
Social platforms and games have historically been the best examples of inspiring new generations to code. Let’s cut to the fun part: making something that works, being proud of it, and using it with your friends.
Seam is rethinking software design to evolve alongside how people connect, build, and express their identities online. Custom, visual spaces will allow everyone to build social spaces that speak to their unique needs and the needs of their communities.
Seam’s Social Spaces
The core social primitive of the future is not the feed—it’s the group chat. While algorithmic feeds work well for consuming news and influencer content, it doesn’t serve the needs of a social network. Increasingly users are flocking towards private spaces over public spaces for their closest friends. Seam embraces this trend, because groupchats have 3 qualities:
Ephemerality: Groupchats can be spun up and then abandoned for a specific use case. A trip with a group of people deserves a new groupchat.
Clear audience: The messages you send go directly to the specified group. The audience has a clear reason for existing, and a clear set of people to receive the content you are sending.
Clear context around data sharing. When you share a photo into the groupchat, you implicitly have an understanding around the context in which it will be received.
The Seam Page seeks to embody the above three characteristics of a groupchat. They will be ephemeral; easy to spin up and then abandon as the usecase demands (unlike FB Groups, which feel heavy and ever present). They will have a clear audience; the people you create a card with are the ones who can co-create the card with you. They will have clear context around data sharing; when you add a mini-app, if it contains your data, you are actively and intentionally dragging it into the space.
Social versus Influencer Networks
It’s important to distinguish the difference between influencer media and social media. I’ve written about it here, but the gist is that influencer media is meant to go viral; users have a desire to reach as many people as possible with their content. The goal is to entertain, to inform, and to influence. Examples of these networks are obviously Tiktok, Twitter, and increasingly these days, Instagram. Social media, on the other hand, is intended to go to just the people you care about. There’s a much higher bar for privacy, and the audience is people that you know in real life. Examples are Facebook, Snapchat, and the new wave of Gen-Z social apps like BeReal. Seam is a social network, not an influencer network. Seam is for close friends and communities, rather than building for influencers, amassing followers, or portable social graphs.
Join Us on this Exciting Journey
As we unveil Seam, we're igniting a movement. A movement that reimagines how we interact, express, and connect in the digital world.
We are crafting a space where creativity isn’t just encouraged, it’s the cornerstone. Where your imagination isn’t confined by algorithms or templates, but empowered by the limitless potential of your own ideas. We're nurturing a community of dreamers, creators, and innovators, each bringing their unique vision to life.
This is your invitation to be part of something groundbreaking. Whether you're a coder, a designer, or someone who just loves to explore, there's a place for you on Seam. Together, we’ll shape the future of social media.
Let’s remix the internet to make the internet personal and whimsical again. Create your Seam profile — I’m excited to see what you cook up!
Does this sound exciting? We’re currently hiring!
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