We launched Pidgeon a few weeks ago, and since then we've had a chance to fix a lot of bugs and upgrade the usability a significant amount.
The app is made just for photo sharing. No videos, no NFTs, just pictures, comments, and chats. Each post is ranked like on reddit - a combination of the user upvote/downvotes and the amount of time passed since the post's creation.
We're also trying to stay away from ads, and instead adopt a freemium model. The main reason for this is because people are a lot more concerned with privacy these days, and if we aren't serving ads, then the user knows that we don't have an incentive to steal their data.
There's already a small community of about 1500 on the app, with a lot of them being professional photographers. So the photos going up look really nice (at least in my opinion). But we don't just want to be a community of people who consider themselves photographers - that's a mistake that other platforms like Flickr and VSCO make. To become widespread, you need to make your platform simple to use for the casual person; only catering to professionals will necessarily keep your community smaller than it otherwise would be.
Users have been asking for a desktop client, and while we don't have one yet, we do plan to add it - and it won't take us as long as IG to do it, and neither will it be an afterthought where the UX is intentionally made poor so that you're pushed to use the app instead. But we want to polish the mobile app first before we get there, and there's still a lot of work to do since it's super early days.
If you want to try it out, here's the link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.pidgeon.pidgeon
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pidgeon-simple-photo-sharing/id1605784768
And please do provide any feedback you have on the app! It really does help us make it better.
Also gotta say I love the simple and straightforward UI, the dice-rolling thing add a unique touch too.
However, I can see that the app still need a lot of performance tweak, the UX for exiting out of a horizontal image scroll is weird as well, I would prefer to be able to swipe up to exit the view here. Otherwise, cool app thus far!