scii
An ascii-native social network, terminal first: posts, colors, avatars and images are all characters. A signed native terminal client for macOS and Linux, installed with Homebrew, and a web client with the same screens and keys. Passwordless sign-in through Hypery by QR code, keyboard-driven feed, inline post colors, palettes made from posts, and images converted to colored ascii with a choice of character ramps. Built entirely in Tish.
- BPM
- 195
- GRADE
- SS
- LEVEL
- 9
- RELEASES
- 7
- YEARS
- 2026–2026
- scii.io
- Web app
- Docs
- Releases
- sciiio/scii
- sciiio/homebrew-scii
- sciiio/scii-releases
- sciiio/scii-popcraft
- sciiio/.github
A Social Network Made Of Characters
I started this June 11, 2026 and worked on it through mid August. It's a social network where every image, every avatar and every frame of the feed renders as colored ASCII. Terminal first, web second, and the web client mirrors the terminal one.
The whole stack is tish: a native tish:http and tish:fs server with an image-to-ASCII engine, a Lattish web client, and a terminal renderer using the same Lattish component API, backed by Rust crates for raw-mode I/O. Local binaries ship through the same four channels tish uses: a Homebrew tap, npm, Cargo, and platform binaries on GitHub releases.
I wanted to see the same component tree paint a DOM in one place and character cells in another, and to use the release setup I'd spent three months on for a project that wasn't tish itself.
The architecture diagram is in ASCII too, of course.
scii is a social network made entirely of text. Posts, colors, avatars and images are all characters, and it is terminal first: you read and post from a real terminal app, or from the web client at scii.io/app, which shows exactly the same screens with the same keys, laid out for a phone.
It is released. The terminal client is a single native binary with no runtime — one for Apple silicon Macs, signed with a Developer ID, and one for Linux x86-64 — published with a SHA256SUMS file on every release and installable with brew install sciiio/scii/scii. Releases are built and published automatically from the source repository.
There are no passwords. Running scii the first time shows a QR code in the terminal; you scan it with your phone, approve the sign-in with Hypery, and the terminal picks it up. New accounts choose an @handle once. On a machine with no browser nearby, scii login --email sends the sign-in link instead.
The feed reads like a chat, newest at the bottom. It is made for the keyboard: j/k move, enter opens a thread, n posts or replies, R reposts or quotes, 1–8 react, F follows a person or a #tag, f switches the home feed between everyone and the people you follow, and ? lists every key. The composer is a small editor with line numbers, and @mentions and #tags are links you can tab to.
Color is part of the text. /xred, /xff6ac1 or a palette slot like /x4 changes color mid-post and /x0 resets it; the composer colors the text as you type, and the colors look the same in every client. Press p on a post you like and scii builds a palette from its colors and themes the whole app with it; press it again to shuffle which color goes where, and save the ones worth keeping.
Images become ascii. Attach a png, jpeg, gif or webp and it is converted to colored characters while you watch: pick the character ramp — classic, blocks, shades or dense — luminance or intensity mode, keep the image's colors or use one, and invert it, then preview before posting. Animated gifs keep playing in both clients. Reactions are tiny ascii too: up to eight characters, like \o/, ^_^ or <3, with no emoji picker.
The whole stack is Tish: a native tish:http server with the image-to-ascii engine, a Lattish web client, and a terminal renderer that draws the same components. The animations on the site and the README are made in PopCraft.
before this
- Next Social2023images to ASCII art as a social feed
- ASCII Social2024second pass at the ASCII social feed