Palmsy is a device-only ‘social network’ to satisfy your posting itch

When you sign up to a new social network, you have zero friends, zero followers, zero likes. But as you start posting content, you might get more and more likes and comments. That could lead to new followers. And that dopamine boost will encourage you to post even more. A new app called Palmsy is trying to act as social media methadone by letting you post anything and getting likes on them.

But the catch is that no one can see the posts.

You can publish as many posts as you like. The app even lets you add photos to your posts. But you’re sending those posts into the void. Developer Pat Nakajima said on Threads that no post leaves your device and all likes are fake.

The free app — which works on both iPhone and iPad — essentially reads your contact list to assign pretend likes to posts. While the app is reading your contact details, because all posts are local, contact information is not sent to a server.

“It can be fun to see Likes coming in from folks you haven’t thought about in years. It can also be useful in maybe deleting some contacts you might not need anymore,” Nakajima writes in the FAQ section of the app.

Beyond looking at contacts, you can treat the app as a personal diary or even a place to get bad puns out of your system — nobody is going to judge you. It’s up to you.

The developer recently updated the app with some advanced options that let you limit the number of likes on a particular post and for how long you want those likes to come in: a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours or a few days.

There have been multiple time-limiting apps that try to help when it comes to reducing social media addiction. Some developers have also released very basic apps to post dumb posts without consequences.

In 2018, former Google Reader product manager Jason Shellen relaunched Brizzly as a website, which lets you put anything in a text box and hit send. The posts go nowhere and you can’t even see them once you hit send.