Building a Self-Hosted Un-Pinterest

I’ve been struggling for a while to find an app that actually lets me save visual inspiration the way I want to. Pinterest was my go-to for years, but that ship seems headed in the wrong direction—inspiration is supposed to be the start of a journey, not the destination—and I’m tired of being stuck in the dopamine-loop trap.

I don’t mind putting in the effort to explore and find inspiration myself instead of being drip-fed by algorithms. I don’t want floods of ads. I don’t care about engagement or tracking. I definitely don’t want to be force-fed AI slop.

I just want to save what I save, and see what I saved. So I’m building what I want:

A ‘home’ feed that shows the firehose of what I’ve recently saved
Collections and subsections for organizing
Tagging for additional filtering
Title, description, and ratings for saves
Automatic color palette extraction
Image recognition would be cool, but I’m not sure my current cheap hosting can handle that (maybe locally, though…)
A browser extension for saving images directly (with semi-smart collection sorting)
Manual uploads for edge cases or stuff that isn’t online anywhere
Automatic thumbnail generation (including flattening GIFs into stills)
Masonry layout
Human-friendly URLs
Light and dark modes
Accessibility built in from the start
Duplicate detection to flag already-saved images
Search across tags, titles, descriptions, and colors

The list will evolve as I progress, but what you won’t see are “social” features. No likes, no comments, no chasing imaginary internet points. This is for collecting and organizing inspiration—not gaining followers.

Also, this won’t replace something like PureRef, which is better for focused, project-specific reference. This is more of a general inspiration pool.

A few technical notes: I’ve been working with Laravel and enjoy it, so that’s my starting point—paired with Livewire and Alpine.js. SQLite is fine for now since I’m the only user (famous last words). I’m building the browser extension for Firefox.

As for the name? I’m calling it Saves. Straightforward and to the point: here’s all of your saves.