Today we are announcing the sunsetting of Seam, both the website as well as the iOS app. Throughout the past two years, we’ve seen some incredible artistic creations and communities. This post serves as a showcase of all of the amazing creations that Seam inspired during its bright lifetime.

What was Seam?

Seam was the first community-developed app to code, design, and curate your perfect social

We became a social network that allowed users to build and sell open-source miniapps. We provided a platform for online creatives to showcase their work, curate inspiration, and collaborate with peers.

Along the way, our users made some pretty incredible art and culture:

Profile Showcase

Initially in 2022, Seam featured a drag-and-drop website editor to create profiles similar to MySpace. Users filled their profiles with 12 different customizable blocks (later called mini apps), like GIF blocks and general iframes for adding music. You even had a “wall block” that allowed anyone else to write messages directly onto your page.

Some of our favorites from this time were:

Making a Seam profile was especially fun because it was possible to compose from all over the internet. People added their favorite DJ sets, moodboards, and themes. Seam websites stood out as a chaotic, weird bastion of personal expression.

In addition to the profiles, users could create standalone webpages (”cards”) from the same building blocks. At the time, we leveraged web3 technology to pull in art from crypto wallets.

Profiles with Collections

As part of a shift towards becoming an app, Seam morphed into a Pinterest-like social network where users collected content using community-developed miniapps. With these Pinterest-like profiles, users collected media into their collections, which lived as tiles on their profile. As with everything within Seam, these tiles could be customized, and we had some pretty creative interpretations of opacity within the constraints of the profile editor:

The common thread through these experiments and eras was one of user customization. We like to “Remix the Internet”. After a decade of Facebook and Instagram profiles, the arc of the internet is bending back towards the Myspace era of personalization. Seam was our attempt at making the internet more eclectic and comfortable.

Seam Miniapps

Once you set up your profile on Seam, it was time to start sharing your creative work. The core piece of sharing on Seam was the miniapp. Miniapps are tiny playgrounds, allowing you to create content. When you’re done, you make a post. Importantly, anyone could create a miniapp—all the code was open source, allowing users to learn from examples when creating their own.

Miniapps are software Legos; they are small, re-usable components and functionality. All the Seam miniapps still live as open source code on Github.

Pixel Art

The Pixel Art miniapp was the first viral Seam miniapp. The Pixel Art miniapp allows you to become a pixel artist and then share the final masterpiece as a post. “Inspired by glittery icons on MySpace, customizing skins in Animal Crossing, and making sprites for video games, this [miniapp] lets you create and share Pixel Art masterpieces to your Seam Profiles.” Created by user @emilee (@eurbs on GitHub), it was published to the miniapp marketplace and immediately became a hit with people making art for their profiles.

Just a Thought and the Seam Community Font

One of our favorite community moments on Seam happened when we launched the Calligraphy Miniapp. An unassuming post featuring an illustrative letter “A” by Seam user @mrlando appeared, alongside a request that the community create the rest of the letters of the alphabet.

The community came together to create the letters of the alphabet, and the Seam Community Font was born! But the story does not end there. Seam user @emilee created another miniapp, one which allowed users to create colorful text posts using the community-generated font.

Miniapp Hackathons

During Summer 2024, we ran the Seam Miniapp Challenge, a competition to see who could create the most exciting miniapps. We had nearly 200 participants, and awarded five submissions with prizes! The first and second place slots went to the miniapps with the most total unlocks. We also gave out three superlative prizes.

• First place with 885 unlocks went to Dizzy Text by Seam user @schloknemani

• Second place with 479 unlocks went to Color Catcher by Seam user @stressedsadness

• The award for most creative went to Potato Fortunes, by Seam user @roxanne

• The award for best design went to Layered Image, by Seam user @jakeaicher

• The award for highest quality went to Magic Card Creator, by Seam user @ixenbay

  

It was awesome traveling as a team to Georgia and working with students to design new miniapps!

In September 2024, we were lucky enough to run a weekend-long design challenge at SCAD.

Working with art students, we got to experience the other side of creating a miniapp, one centered around design. Watching each team present their ideas and designs for Seam miniapps, all created within the past 36 hours, we were impressed by their skills in both design and presentation.

Choosing a winner was difficult, but ultimately we selected the Seam Meme miniapp, which we later built and added to Seam! This miniapp was great because it allowed users to easily create and post custom memes directly to Seam!

Our Next Project, Tome

While Seam was a fun place to create, the content was all very different so it was hard to feel like home for any one particular creative community. We took our learnings to niche down to build big – of all our miniapps on Seam, the book posting miniapp had the best retention and strongest community.

Earlier this year, we launched Tome, the social network for readers! We hit #1 in the Books category of the App Store, and #6 overall that day, with over 100k people on our waitlist! By focusing on Fantasy readers, we were able to build an enthusiastic community on Tome. Since then, we have been working steadily to improve Tome and add new features, such as Book Tracking and a functioning Marketplace where users buy and sell profile badges.

Our current project is building Communities, or dedicated spaces for readers interested in different genres, fandoms, tropes, and hobbies. This update will mean Tome is an even better place for all kinds of bookish people, and will be live mid-November. We hope you’ll check it out!

Take a peek at the current Tome.

Stay up-to-date on our progress by following us on SubStack!