> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://moomean.com/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # UNALGORA and the Internet I Wanted Back - URL: https://moomean.com/blog/unalgora-and-the-internet-i-wanted-back/ - Published: 2026-09-26T08:58:29.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-26T09:03:18.000Z - Description: A social network without algorithms, advertising, bots, or the ambition to consume your entire day. - Author: Moomean Alshemali Aldeiri - Tags: Web Development For the past few years, I have been gradually reducing the amount of time I spend on social media. I never really got into platforms like TikTok or Snapchat in the first place, but even the services I had used for years—Facebook, Instagram, X—started becoming less and less attractive to me. I eventually removed Facebook and Instagram from my phone entirely. These days, if I check them at all, I usually do it from a computer. Part of that was simply screen time. I did not want to spend hours endlessly scrolling through things that I had never actually asked to see. But there was something else bothering me too. Modern social media had stopped feeling like a place where I went to see people I knew. Instead, it increasingly felt like a machine deciding what I should look at. The algorithm knew what it wanted me to see. The advertising system knew what it wanted me to buy. The platform wanted another few minutes of my attention. And somewhere underneath all of that was an enormous amount of data collection trying to figure out what I might click next. I became tired of it. Sometimes the experience could even become slightly unsettling. I would search for something—or occasionally simply have a conversation about something—and not long afterward I would start seeing related advertisements or product recommendations online. Whether every individual case was actually connected or simply coincidence and extremely effective profiling almost did not matter anymore. The feeling was the problem. The internet increasingly felt like it was watching me. So I started using those websites less. And then, completely out of nowhere, I had a thought: **Why doesn't somebody make social media like it used to be?** Not visually old. Not a museum. Not some elaborate recreation of Facebook from 2007. Just the basic idea. You make an account. You find people. You add friends. You post something. Your friends see it. You see what they post. That's it. No advertising. No algorithm deciding that somebody else's post deserves to appear above your friend's. No endless stream of recommended strangers. No engagement machine trying to keep you angry, excited, frightened, or addicted. That thought eventually became [**UNALGORA**](https://unalgora.com/?ref=moomean.com). ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.16.56---PM.png) ## I Didn't Miss the Old Internet Because It Was Old There is obviously a lot of nostalgia around the older internet. People remember MSN Messenger, early Facebook, Hi5, forums, personal websites, old operating systems, and all kinds of strange little communities that existed before everything was consolidated into a handful of enormous platforms. I understand the nostalgia. I am certainly not immune to it. But UNALGORA was never supposed to be a retro website. I was not interested in recreating old graphics, pretending CSS3 did not exist, or making everybody browse at 800×600 resolution. What I missed was something deeper. I missed when websites felt like **places you deliberately went to**. You opened MSN because you wanted to talk to somebody. You visited a forum because you were interested in what that community was discussing. You opened someone's profile because you wanted to know what they had posted. There was much less machinery sitting between you and the people you had chosen to interact with. That is what I wanted back. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.18.40---PM.png) UNALGORA user's main feed\] ## The Feed Should Just Be a Feed One of the first decisions was also one of the easiest: The feed would be chronological. That sounds almost absurdly simple, but today it feels almost radical. If one of my friends posts something at 2:00 PM and another friend posts something at 3:00 PM, the second post appears above the first. There is no invisible calculation deciding that the 2:00 PM post might generate 17 percent more engagement. There is no ranking based on how controversial something is. There is no sponsored content inserted between them. There is no mysterious collection of "recommended posts" from people I have never met. You chose your friends. They posted things. Here are the things they posted. I do not think social interaction needs to be more complicated than that. The same philosophy eventually extended into other parts of the website. Circles, for example, remain communities where people can join around an interest and see what other members are saying without an algorithm deciding which member deserves the microphone. The site became considerably more sophisticated over time. The fundamental idea did not. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.21.46---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.22.01---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.22.14---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.22.27---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.22.41---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.22.52---PM.png) **Several UNALGORA posts with timestamps* ## No Advertising Means No Advertising Another thing I wanted to be extremely clear about was advertising. There isn't any. UNALGORA was not created as a system for collecting a large audience and eventually selling access to that audience. And I don't want somebody's personal information quietly turning into the product either. Modern advertising ecosystems can become extraordinarily complicated. Tracking pixels, behavioral profiles, cross-site identifiers, recommendation systems, remarketing—the average person should not need to understand an entire digital-advertising industry just to talk to their friends online. I wanted something much simpler. Come to the website. Talk to people. Leave. The website does not need to chase you around afterward trying to sell you a refrigerator because you looked at kitchen appliances three days earlier. That simplicity matters to me. ## I Wanted People, Not "Users" One thing became increasingly important as UNALGORA developed: I did not want a website full of accounts. I wanted a website full of **people**. Those are not necessarily the same thing. Anyone who has spent enough time online has seen what happens when bots, spam accounts, automated replies, engagement farms, and fake profiles begin overwhelming a community. Eventually you stop knowing whether anybody is actually there. I wanted UNALGORA to resist that from the beginning. Creating an account therefore requires human verification and email verification. If an account appears suspicious, it can also be investigated and blocked. The goal is not to brag that UNALGORA has hundreds of millions of accounts. Quite frankly, I don't want hundreds of millions of accounts. A smaller community of real people is worth considerably more to me than enormous numbers populated by bots, spam, advertisers, fake engagement, and people who have no interest in actually participating. **No bots** became one of the principles I care about most. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.25.29---PM-1.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.26.43---PM.png) **Log in and Registration pages* ## Small Is Fine There is a very common assumption in technology that every successful project must eventually become enormous. Growth becomes the objective. More users. More engagement. More posts. More time on site. More revenue. More everything. UNALGORA does not need that. If it eventually becomes a reasonably small community of people who appreciate honesty, curiosity, discussion, and genuine connection, I would consider that far more interesting than building another giant social platform. A community can become worse when it becomes too large. You stop recognizing people. Interactions become increasingly anonymous. Moderation becomes industrial. Bots become unavoidable. The entire thing starts behaving less like a community and more like infrastructure. I would rather UNALGORA feel like walking into a familiar café than walking into an airport terminal. You may not know everybody. But you recognize people. You have conversations. People develop personalities. You gradually become part of the place. That is much closer to what I want. ## Freedom Without an Algorithmic Babysitter Another reason I became dissatisfied with large social platforms was moderation. Large platforms operate at a scale where enormous rule systems become almost unavoidable. Automated moderation systems make decisions. Context disappears. Posts are sometimes removed or restricted without people understanding why. Different users may also experience enforcement inconsistently. I did not want that style of community. UNALGORA should provide people with considerable freedom to express themselves, including opinions other people may disagree with. That does not mean "anything whatsoever goes." A functioning community still needs protection against things such as spam, impersonation, targeted harassment, automated abuse, illegal content, and people deliberately trying to destroy the community. But there is a major difference between maintaining a community and trying to sanitize every conversation into something acceptable to an enormous advertising platform. People should be allowed to talk like people. They should be able to disagree. They should be able to make jokes. They should be able to have unpopular opinions. And they should not constantly be wondering whether an automated system is interpreting every sentence without context. That balance matters to me. ## It Started With Almost Nothing The funny thing about UNALGORA is that none of this began with some enormous product roadmap. There was no five-year business plan. No investor deck. No "Phase One: Capture Market." The original version was incredibly basic. You could create a profile. You could search for somebody. You could add them as a friend. You could make a post. And there was a chronological feed. That was basically the experiment. Could we take the fundamental idea of an old-school social website, remove most of the machinery that modern social networks have accumulated, and still make something enjoyable? The answer was yes. And then the problem became that once it started working, I kept thinking: *"Well... it would be nice if it could do this too."* And that is where things started getting interesting. ## Then It Started Becoming a Place Once people could add friends and post things, another question appeared: How do you find people you might actually want to know? That eventually led to better search and discovery. Then profiles needed more personality. So interests became part of the system. Location information could help people understand where somebody was from or discover people in a particular place. Profiles gradually became more complete. Then there were photos. Comments. Likes and other interactions. Notifications. Direct messaging. Link previews. YouTube previews. Privacy controls. Better friend discovery. Tools for managing relationships and conversations. Features that seem obvious when looking at the finished website did not necessarily exist in the beginning. They appeared one at a time because the website started creating its own questions. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.28.30---PM.png) ****User profile (featuring my profile)** And then came **Circles**. Circles were a natural extension of the same idea. Friendship is one way people connect. Shared interests are another. Maybe you want to talk about Linux. Maybe retro computing. Maybe photography. Fitness. Cooking. Science. Books. Whatever. A Circle gives people interested in the same subject somewhere to gather without requiring them to already know one another. Again, the idea remains deliberately simple. Find something you care about. Join the Circle. Talk to people. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.29.57---PM.png) ****Random Circle Page** ## Discovering People Without Turning Them Into Content This was another interesting design problem. I wanted people to be able to discover new friends. After all, one of the purposes of UNALGORA is actually **meeting people**. But there is a difference between helping somebody discover another human being and turning human beings themselves into algorithmically recommended content. Interests help. Location can help. Search helps. Circles help. You might discover someone because you both love retro computers, cooking, weight training, astronomy, Linux, or whatever else. That feels fundamentally different from an algorithm saying: > "This person statistically resembles accounts you previously spent 6.4 seconds looking at." One system facilitates discovery. The other optimizes attention. That distinction became increasingly important as UNALGORA grew. ## The Retro-Computing Community Got It Immediately Something I did not fully anticipate was how strongly UNALGORA would resonate with certain corners of the internet. Especially retro-computing people. People involved with projects such as the Escargot MSN Messenger revival already understand the appeal of bringing back older ways of communicating—not necessarily because they reject modern technology, but because some older systems did certain things extraordinarily well. They were direct. They were personal. They often felt more intentional. When people from those communities saw UNALGORA, many of them immediately understood what we were trying to do. That reaction was important to me because it confirmed that the idea was not purely personal nostalgia. Other people missed this kind of internet too. Not necessarily the graphics. Not necessarily the old computers. The **feeling**. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/sss.JPG) UNALGORA being used on an my Windows XP computer ## Old-School Does Not Mean Technologically Old This is something I want to emphasize. UNALGORA is old-school in philosophy. It is not deliberately technologically obsolete. Modern security matters. Modern encryption matters. Responsive design matters. Protecting accounts matters. Making the website usable on phones matters. Making it function reliably matters. The goal is not to reproduce every limitation of the internet from twenty years ago. It is to ask: **Which changes since then actually improved the internet, and which changes mostly improved somebody's ability to monetize our attention?** Keep the first category. Question the second. That distinction shaped a surprising number of design decisions. Even small ones. No autoplaying media. No needlessly heavy interface. No infinite feed designed to make stopping psychologically difficult. The website can have an end. You can reach the bottom of a page. I consider that a feature. ## The Site Kept Growing, But the Idea Stayed Small UNALGORA today contains considerably more than the first version. Profiles became richer. Interests became searchable. People gained more ways to find each other. Circles provided shared spaces. Messaging made private conversations possible. Notifications became smarter. Posts gained photos, links, revisions, visibility controls, and other conveniences. Administrative and moderation systems matured. Mobile usability improved. The community developed its own little identity. We even ended up calling members **UNALGORIANS**. That was definitely not on some original specification sheet. It just happened. And I love that. Because somewhere during development, UNALGORA stopped feeling like a pile of features and started feeling like a place. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.32.46---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.33.42---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.34.21---PM.png) ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.35.19---PM.png) **Messaging, Interests, Find people, Notifications* ## I Don't Want UNALGORA to Steal Your Life Perhaps the strangest ambition for a social network is this: I do not want people spending their entire day on it. I want somebody to open UNALGORA, see what their friends posted, reply to somebody, discover an interesting conversation, perhaps meet a new person—and eventually close the browser. Go cook something. Go outside. Read a book. Play a game. Call somebody. Go to the gym. Live. A social network should supplement your social life. It should not become your social life. And it definitely should not employ teams of psychologists, data scientists, designers, and recommendation algorithms whose collective objective is making it harder for you to leave. If somebody uses UNALGORA for fifteen enjoyable minutes and then goes away for the rest of the day, I don't consider that a product failure. I consider it working exactly as intended. ## Maybe the Internet Can Still Have Small Places I am not trying to replace Facebook. Or Instagram. Or X. Or Reddit. UNALGORA does not need to defeat anybody. It doesn't need billions of accounts. It doesn't need venture capital. It doesn't need to "disrupt social media." I just wanted somewhere online where I could meet people, talk to friends, exchange ideas, post pictures, join communities, and see what people actually chose to share with me. Without advertisements. Without an algorithm deciding what deserves my attention. Without my behavior being treated as raw material for an advertising profile. Without armies of bots pretending to be people. Without every interaction being optimized for engagement. Just people. And perhaps that is what I missed most about the older internet. Not that it was old. Not that the websites were primitive. Not that the computers were slower. I missed the feeling that when I opened a website, **I was the one who had decided why I was there**. UNALGORA is my attempt to build a little piece of that internet again. Not the whole internet. Just one small corner of it. And honestly, that is enough. ![](https://moomean.com/blog/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-26-at-5.37.34---PM.png) ****UNALGORA homepage** ## A Shout-Out to the Early UNALGORIANS UNALGORA may have started as my idea, but a social network is meaningless without people willing to actually show up and use it. So I want to give a special shout-out to some of the early UNALGORIANS who joined, tested things, posted, talked, found bugs, gave feedback, and generally helped turn the project from a website I was building into an actual little community. [spindok](https://unalgora.com/u/spindok?ref=moomean.com) [Happi\_ovo](https://unalgora.com/u/mrkim1122?ref=moomean.com) [BrianTheElectrician](https://unalgora.com/u/briantheelectrician?ref=moomean.com) [Paula Balieiro](https://unalgora.com/u/gonnafreecss?ref=moomean.com) [ALHARIRI JAFAR](https://unalgora.com/u/alhariri?ref=moomean.com) Thank you for being there while UNALGORA was still figuring out what it wanted to become. Every post, conversation, bug report, suggestion, and random bit of activity helped shape it. And if you were one of the people who joined early: you are quite literally part of the history of the place. **Long live the UNALGORIANS.** 😎