Show HN: Ten_cubed – Artificially restricted social graph

Ten_cubed launched on Hacker News this week as a concept for a deliberately small social network, posted by user darkpicnic on August 26, 2026. The core constraint: every user gets exactly 10 first-degree connections, and the network only extends to a maximum of 1,110 theoretical connections across three degrees of separation.

The rules are straightforward, per the Show HN post. Each user holds 10 connections. The graph extends outward to first, second, or third degree — and users can set their own preference for how far out they want to see. At the outer limit (10 connections per person, three degrees deep), the reachable network caps at 1,110 accounts. No algorithmic feed expansion, no follower counts in the millions.

The project's stated goal is avoiding what the creator calls "enshittification" — the pattern in which social platforms degrade over time as they optimize for engagement and advertiser revenue over user experience. By hard-coding scarcity into the graph itself, Ten_cubed is designed so that the network structurally cannot scale into the dynamics that the creator argues cause that degradation. The project site describes the concept but does not yet detail a production implementation.

The constrained model produces some structural side effects that darkpicnic notes are intentional: because first-degree connection slots are finite and scarce, users are expected to be selective about who they connect with. Networks can also be volatile — as people swap out connections, the downstream second- and third-degree graph shifts significantly, causing a user's visible network to "swell and contract" depending on their connections' choices.

No funding, team size, founding date, or commercial plans are disclosed in the source material. The post was submitted with one point and no comments at time of publication, and no additional corroborating sources were available. Whether Ten_cubed is a working product, an early prototype, or a design proposal remains unclear from the available information.