I built an AI-proof social network at 15, alone
I'm 15, been coding for a while. Spent the last 5 months building arty.guru - a social network for artists where the whole point is not doing the stuff that makes every other platform suck.
I got tired of seeing artists complain that their work ends up in AI training datasets without consent. So I built something where that just doesn't happen.
No algorithm deciding if your art deserves to be seen. No ads. No tracking. No Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no third-party cookies. Your followers see your posts. That's it.
[+] The privacy is real
IPs get hashed for rate limiting and thrown away, never stored raw. Personal data is AES-256 encrypted. Passwords use Argon2id. DMs and voice calls are E2EE via WebRTC. There's an image proxy so external images go through my server instead of leaking your IP to whoever hosted the original.
[+] The anti-AI scraping took the most work
When you turn on AI protection for a post, the image gets encrypted and sliced on the server, then scrambled and delivered to the browser in a custom binary format with AES-256-GCM. The JS reassembles it on canvas with strip descrambling - bots see encrypted garbage. The client library is obfuscated with control flow flattening, dead code injection, and domain locking so it only runs on arty.guru.
Every image gets a pHash for duplicate detection. Downloads get a visible watermark with the author's name plus an invisible LSB steganography watermark in the pixels - so you can trace where leaked art came from. There's also a proof-of-work challenge layer that blocks scrapers before they reach anything. You can set a Creative Commons license per post.
I tested it with Claude Code - it spent 22 minutes trying to manually extract one protected image. Scrapers don't get through.
[+] Server-side security
Hardened WAF, rate limiting, brute force protection, strict CSP headers. Custom Cloudflare firewall rules on top. The whole thing runs on a small VPS — OpenLiteSpeed handles 3-5x the throughput of nginx+php-fpm so it stays fast without needing expensive hardware.
[+] Everything is actually free
Not free-tier-with-limits free. Just free.
Custom emoji - make your own packs up to 250 emoji and share them publicly. Voice rooms, 1080p streaming, screen sharing, soundpad with user-made packs. Real-time E2EE DMs with typing indicators and read receipts. Posts support images, audio with waveform player, video, polls, markdown, spoiler tags, NSFW marking.
There's a shop with themes, avatar frames and badges - you buy them with Sparks. You earn Sparks just by logging in daily, so you don't have to pay for anything if you don't want to.
Android app too, built that myself as well using Capatitor.
GDPR/CCPA compliant, export or nuke your data whenever.
[+] Stack
PHP 8.3 + Rust + Node.js + MariaDB + Redis behind OpenLiteSpeed and Cloudflare. Built everything solo - backend, frontend, voice, chat, Android app. Moving more to Rust as I go.
135 users, zero marketing. Been building in the void for a while.
https://Arty.guru - check it out if you're tired of your art ending up somewhere it shouldn't.
What am I missing?
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