[HN Gopher] Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for fri...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not
influencers
Author : CitrusFruits
Score : 358 points
Date : 2022-04-16 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slowsocial.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (slowsocial.us)
| jdrc wrote:
| this is more like a journal than a social network then
| gtirloni wrote:
| FAQ: How do I export my data?
| _greim_ wrote:
| Upon following the magic link I got this: 500
| Cannot find module '/var/task/node_modules/party-js/lib'
| Error: Cannot find module '/var/task/node_modules/party-js/lib'
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| :(
|
| That's happened before, but I thought I fixed it. I guess I'll
| just take out the party.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| If you reload and go to /onboard it might work, otherwise you
| can just go to `/`, you'll just have to find your way around
| by yourself.
| SmallBets wrote:
| Constraints can be liberating and increase focus and creativity.
| See limited budget films vs formulaic blockbusters, or even
| twitters orignal 140 limit and how it led to the platform
| flourishing.
|
| I think there is definitely room for a product like this, and
| maybe even some kind of max follower limit could also skew more
| to connection over influencers.
| riffic wrote:
| I love this segment of an interview with Charles Eames
| regarding design's need for constraints: Q:
| Does the creation of Design admit constraint? A: Design
| depends largely on constraints. Q: What constraints?
|
| A: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective
| keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to
| recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his
| willingness and enthusiasm for working within these
| constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of
| balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has
| its own peculiar list.
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Eames
|
| https://www.vitra.com/en-us/magazine/details/what-is-your-de...
| engineer_22 wrote:
| You need an android app.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I need an iOS app too.
| darawk wrote:
| As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed
| perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right
| solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people
| think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization
| algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either.
|
| IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over
| content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I
| mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what
| kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By
| "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice
| explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an
| implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and
| being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being
| able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are
| no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me.
|
| The biggest problem with social media right now is that the
| incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make
| these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our
| information environment using our higher order executive
| functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains,
| one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose:
| either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you
| take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not.
|
| Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed
| thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off"
| would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of
| content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage
| their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to
| it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the
| manner in which they are exposed to it.
| [deleted]
| mhink wrote:
| I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on
| Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to
| join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your
| experiences separate).
|
| Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either.
| Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and
| unsubscribe from the massive default subs.
| alephaleph wrote:
| I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're
| more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I
| used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage
| bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and
| more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the
| people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and
| effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side"
| to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer,
| everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to
| quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage
| bait made me a worse person.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally
| couldn't get away from the rage bait either. They keep
| putting things in your feed even if your aren't subscribed.
|
| Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.
| alephaleph wrote:
| oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when
| I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic
| feed, just a subscribed and /r/all.
|
| and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded
| of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued
| that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way,
| reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an
| extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that
| eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's
| focus on small communities managed individually by
| specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama
| that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so,
| but I guess that's neither here nor there.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| I think such a network, while great in theory, would mostly be
| filled with techies like us, because by design, it favors
| intentional interaction over mindless swiping, giving
| advertisers less incentive to fund you and thus eventually
| struggling to remain solvent.
|
| Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations,
| such a network might absolutely THRIVE!
|
| Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively
| with the idea that these products can be living breathing
| things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do
| I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly
| not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!
| solstice wrote:
| This sounds like https://fraidyc.at which is delightfully weird
| and really functional at the same time
| distantsounds wrote:
| It's called RSS. and a feed reader.
|
| I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it
| already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free
| services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the
| same system to ingest exactly what you want.
|
| We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting
| since.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Are there some readers that do some content curation for you
| _on top of your subscriptions_? The biggest issue I had with
| RSS (besides content discovery) is that some people blog
| multiple times a week while others only once in a while. I
| would like something that limits the amount of content I get
| based on how much they post: posts from people who blog only
| once in a while should be more prominently visible than
| others. Some way to mark posts as "I want more of that" or
| "I don't want more of that" would also be helpful to improve
| the curation without having to manually tweak parameters.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| That works for the consumption side, but at least from what
| I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so
| much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to
| miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the
| right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel
| somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Shameless plug: Airss does that. https://airss.roastidio.us
|
| The reader can be used without login. To comment and share,
| you need to login to https://roastidio.us (free open
| registration)
|
| Warning: I have very few users. So you will still feel
| isolated, unless you can gather a community yourself.
| tejtm wrote:
| Ahhh the original web vision and promise of the Semantic Web.
| Snippets of machine readable datum everywhere fetched and
| assembled for you by your own "intelligent agent".
|
| The competition would be innovating better personal agents and
| data tagging.
|
| I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when
| they made http servers and browsers as step zero.
| a-dub wrote:
| so, basically blogs and rss readers... with privacy features
| and channels for subscriptions.
|
| sounds good to me.
| pandesmos wrote:
| > _Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be
| fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned
| off" would be an amazing feature._
|
| Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so
| good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can
| be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't
| take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people
| into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and
| hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
|
| Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using
| a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers,
| here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a
| different core belief than the previous group of RPG people,
| here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But
| Brilliant people.
|
| Then when they added collections so I could present the
| different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to
| unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post
| as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes,
| and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and
| never see it.
|
| I miss it so much.
| pandesmos wrote:
| Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional
| (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground
| by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of
| other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user
| (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass
| follow/watch those people.
|
| "Here is a group of people who are creating things and having
| great conversations with each other. Check it out."
|
| It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice
| party.
|
| Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or
| how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never
| saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
| blondin wrote:
| google+ loss was a true tragedy.
| civilized wrote:
| I think Google+ was just ahead of its time. Now a huge chunk
| of people are ready for a different platform.
| [deleted]
| grumple wrote:
| When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked
| to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1)
| communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3)
| organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5)
| meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to
| supplement your social life.
|
| When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse
| at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a
| useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for
| serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect
| of it though, and really it's the problem with all social
| media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with
| providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook.
| The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not
| forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The feed was introduced in 2006. Facebook was founded in
| 2004. Not many people "flocked" to Facebook before the feed.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I think the feed was chronological for a while. Did it
| switch to being non-chronological in 2006? I thought it was
| later than that.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The algorithmically generated feed was introduced in
| 2011.
| alephaleph wrote:
| the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you
| really _can_ choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the
| next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific
| subreddits and I 'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy
| than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different
| problems.
|
| Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit
| because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait
| made me a worse person.
| DennisP wrote:
| It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use
| reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly
| small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works
| great.
| alephaleph wrote:
| yeah, that's fair. I was also in middle school at the time
| which is probably a bit too young to be using reddit, but I
| think that it's important to recognize that a social media
| platform that gives you high level control of the kind of
| content you see won't completely solve the problem of
| unhealthy social media usage, it will just make it easy for
| your usage to be either very healthy or very unhealthy. And
| that those unhealthy users will end up causing problems for
| the healthy users.
|
| In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff
| twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're
| doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the
| "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more
| effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think this is a good example of the folk wisdom that
| kids don't have the best decisionmaking skills. I spent
| time in many an IRC flamewar as a middle schooler myself,
| so I'm not judging :) of course. Reddit first came out
| while I was in high school and subreddits became a
| feature near the end of my time in HS. I definitely was
| making better choices about the content I consumed as a
| high schooler and I've gotten better as I've gotten
| older!
|
| I deeply appreciate Reddit's openness to customizing the
| experience. The defaults suck, I agree, but you can
| choose to curate the experience how you like. Moreover
| despite lots of jaw clenching over financial incentives,
| Reddit still offers the Old Reddit interface _and_ an API
| which lets power users consume Reddit however they like.
| These values were pretty common among other fora/BBSes at
| the time. The experience one got on 4chan's /a/ or /jp/
| was very different than /b/ or /pol/ or /soc/ (and most
| of 4chan's famed toxicity came from the latter 3 boards.)
| Forums were usually partitioned by topic.
|
| > In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff
| twitter has been doing to try to make it look like
| they're doing something about unhealthy social media
| usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably
| be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
|
| I don't think the algorithmic feed as-is is compatible
| with healthy usage, no matter what rhetoric a company
| uses. ML models need to not only take engagement as input
| but also some sort of personal toxicity input. I need to
| be able to say "content X is addictive to me but not for
| a good reason." The model also needs to offer as much
| transparency as possible to the user, offering things
| like partial dependence plots for auditing by the user.
| I'm not sure whether a ranking model trained that way can
| still provide good ad targeting performance. Moreover
| knobs like this are probably just too complex for a
| layperson to interact with. Many engineers don't
| understand how a partial dependence plot works let alone
| laypeople.
|
| My problem with social media is about the lack of choice.
| I have no qualms that the majority will continue to use
| social media the way most people in the past would spend
| time mindlessly flipping TV channels or window shopping
| at malls and boutiques. But there was always
| alternatives. People that didn't want to spend time
| window shopping could be found in libraries, bookstores,
| bars, playing sports, or outdoors. Once you became an
| adult this was expected. That didn't mean I was
| ostracized from them. I encountered people in college who
| hung out in very different places than me but still
| connected with me over shared interests.
|
| In the social media age every form of social media is
| siloed. If you're not on Twitter you can't engage with
| people on Twitter. If you're not on Facebook you can't
| see people's Facebook content. You _have_ to join the
| platform to reach people on the platform. I'd love to see
| a world of federated social media where we can all talk
| to each other no matter our hobbies and third places.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yes, I've been yearning for platforms really to just let me
| control the database query, basically. I want to be able to
| create custom filters/sorts/queries, or even choose some from
| an algorithm store, that lets me control how I view things.
|
| For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets"
| option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from
| verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified
| people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not
| possible directly within Twitter itself.
|
| It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved--"my
| friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San
| Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago.
|
| Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement
| such options to help us better choose how we see the data--is
| it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to
| the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really
| just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make
| these companies afraid what might happen?
|
| I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I
| wonder why they haven't.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of
| the users and make these companies afraid what might happen?
|
| Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to
| continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep
| coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation
| creates two big problems for this.
|
| 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize
| the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I
| would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is
| not compatible with the business social media companies are
| trying to run. It's all about DAU's.
|
| 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for
| eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new
| set of variables into the equation. This increases the
| likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous
| conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By
| controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company
| can control for this much more easily.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's
| better than other alternatives out there.
|
| Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order
| executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great
| take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not
| something I can really build, even if I had the time,
| resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires
| critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have
| to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks.
| However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am
| interested in building either.
|
| I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern
| definition of a social network, but I also think that
| definition falls very short of the potential for technology to
| facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and
| rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!),
| but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best
| friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria
| as they move from one job to another.
|
| That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking
| point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok,
| etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I
| can really do about it other than start discussion.
| darawk wrote:
| Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing
| is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to
| you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over
| how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better
| abstraction than restrictions on behavior.
|
| So, for something like your network, that might mean rather
| than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the
| option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their
| feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show
| a unit of content from one person no more than once per day",
| where that single block of content is expandable, and gives
| some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what
| its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or
| quickly skim over if I don't care.
| civilized wrote:
| This is exactly what I was trying to say in my other post.
|
| Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement
| algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they
| have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do
| more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do
| different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't
| choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on
| in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot
| takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts
| (or vice versa).
|
| This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially
| inhuman about legacy social media.
| alar44 wrote:
| Neat idea but literally no one wants that. You think the
| average Joe wants to explicitly configure his social media
| algorithms?
|
| Get real.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Does everyone in Path of Exile create their own loot filters?
|
| You could, but most people download neversinks or someone
| else's custom filter.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Crippling frequency isn't the answer. North sure there's anything
| else to say here.
| xtracto wrote:
| Way back in the day there was a great social platform called
| Multiply.com. it allowed you to post videos, pics and blog posts.
| I felt it was better than Myspace or Facebook. Unfortunately it
| didn't survive, but I hope this SlowSocial gets better traction!
| omoikane wrote:
| The "new friends do not get to see old posts" seems very
| limiting, I would certainly want the option of being able to
| share some of my old posts with new friends, given that often new
| friends are made because of some overlap in real life history.
|
| I understand that this platform is perhaps deliberately not
| trying to attract strangers, but other platforms that had taken
| this stance eventually all faded away because all my friends want
| to play at where the parties are at, and those tend not to be
| private networks of this sort. It might be possible to avoid this
| demise if this network grows to be sufficiently large, but it's
| hard to grow when all existing contents are invisible to new
| users.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| You can share old posts with new friends, it's just on a post
| by post basis. But yeah, more fine grained control would be a
| nice feature.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Posts are shared with all of your confirmed friends once
| published (let the people in your life know what you've been
| up to)
|
| That part also seems weird to me, and also why I never really
| post anything to facebook these days (even if I used it more
| than once a month). Unless the things you're writing are
| stupidly generic they won't appeal to all your friends,
| especially since "social media friends" these days also means
| family, coworkers, acquaintences, that one guy you did a
| college project with and never talked to again, etc. Not
| actual friends.
|
| I know which of my friends are interested in what, and I can
| share what I know they'll be interested in hearing via DMs,
| leading to more productive discussions. I'm not sure what the
| appeal of friend-only self posts even is these days, unless
| you're planning a get together of some sort.
|
| If you're making a self post, there must be people that you
| don't know about that can see it, so there is some chance
| that you'll find someone new that's interested in what you
| posted. E.g. posting in fb or discord groups or in public
| like on reddit or here.
| riffic wrote:
| really dig the "slow" idea. Will you federate? There's a good
| argument for this here (you would have a built-in audience of at
| least 5m accounts):
|
| https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/
|
| Federation could be your "moat" to avoid joining the _Club of
| Abandoned Social Apps_ (it 's a harsh ecosystem, ask Clubhouse or
| App.Net).
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Probably won't federate. TBH, federation doesn't appeal to me
| that much. I recognize it has benefits, but it also introduces
| significant complexity.
|
| Plus, Slow Social is already designed to work with the most
| widely adopted federated platform: email. Posts can be sent as
| emails, and there is no comment system other than opening up an
| email and starting a conversation with them that way.
| anarchogeek wrote:
| Closed source and no information about who's making it.... this
| is better how?
| yosito wrote:
| Love this idea, and love that it supports email updates. I think
| that makes it useful even if most (all) of my friends don't use
| it yet. That's something a lot of attempts at doing social
| networks differently miss: it needs to be useful even without all
| my friends being on it, or I'll just stop using it. I submitted
| my email and I'll check this out more in the coming days.
| bananamerica wrote:
| The only thing I dislike is not allowing everyone to see my
| preview posts. If I write something cool that remains relevant,
| I'd be sad to see it go. I might end up just posting in a more
| permanent place instead.
| shlurpy wrote:
| It sounds like a great idea. I did notice a carveout in the
| privacy policy for "if we get acquired, they can do whatever they
| want with any information" which seems... undermining, given how
| getting acquired by one of the worst data brokers is generally
| assumed for any successful social media startup.
| slater wrote:
| Not sure if it's your site, but the sign-up and magic link went
| straight to my GMail's spam folder, with the link removed.
| riffic wrote:
| curious who they're using for transactional email. there are
| unfortunately a few hoops to jump through to ensure
| deliverability.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Supabase does the auth emails. If you make a post and have
| the service email it for you, it uses Sendgrid which seems to
| make it past the spam folder most of the time.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Can you update here what you learn?
|
| This is a huge sticking point for new projects and
| businesses.
| riffic wrote:
| make sure you got the right dns records in place as well. I
| haven't looked at your mail headers yet[0] but you probably
| want to send from a separate subdomain than the one you use
| for everyday use (like for team@slowsocial.us).
|
| [0] This may be seen as a back-handed way of saying I have
| no intention of signing up, but I didn't intend for it to
| be.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, sadly I couldn't figure out how to not make it happen.
| The SSO OAuth providers tend to work better.
|
| If you mark it as "Not spam" it will fix it on a case by case
| basis.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| If enough people start marking it as "Not Spam," would that
| make things better?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd hope so! Ideally I'd be able to send the Magic Link
| from my own domain, but I haven't found a way to do that
| yet through Supabase.
| NanoWar wrote:
| Missed opportunity to call it "Slowcial" ;)
| rglullis wrote:
| The one question I have is: what can I do here that I can not do
| with a messaging group?
| TekMol wrote:
| It's cool. A bit rough around the edges. I see a lot of "NULL"
| and "UNDEFINED" in the interface.
|
| What is your stack?
|
| For how long have you been coding?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yes, definitely rough around the edges.
|
| The DB, Auth, and File Storage is all Supabase. The web
| framework is SvelteKit, and I'm using Sendgrid to send emails.
| Also using Tailwind.
|
| I've been coding for a long time, but have been working on this
| mostly in off hours so I haven't been able to give this the
| polish I'd like to. If you have any screenshots of the nulls or
| undefineds I'd be happy to fix them.
| TekMol wrote:
| Thanks for the info!
|
| "A long time" is very relative. I sometimes meet coders who
| have been coding for 3 years and call it a long time. But for
| me, "a long time" means 20+ years. So I am still curious :)
|
| The "NULLs" and "UNDEFINEDs" went away after I set my user
| name.
| stefanv wrote:
| My first thought after reading the frontpage: this is my
| "liberation" from Facebook and all the things that FB is doing
| wrong. I click on "join today" and I see "continue with
| Facebook". Why?
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Because for them to even think of approaching a userbase size
| that can enjoy network effects, they will need to make signing-
| up as easy as possible. Using some of the other OAuths is a
| smart business decision in my opinion.
| [deleted]
| Method-X wrote:
| To minimize the friction of switching over for most regular
| folks. It doesn't force you to use Facebook. You can use your
| email, Google and GitHub too.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yup, this is exactly right. Facebook was the last OAuth
| provider I added because I don't love being tied to them, but
| at the end of the day some people just want the easiest way
| to authenticate possible, and Facebook is one of the largest
| authentication providers available in the world.
|
| And to put it into perspective, yes Facebook is able to
| collect information about you when you use them as an
| authentication provider (like when you log in, how often, how
| long your sessions are), but beyond that it's a pretty narrow
| interaction.
| privatdozent wrote:
| Question: Does encouraging people to sign up with FB (bc it
| is faster/easier) also have the unwanted consequence of
| preventing them from leaving FB in the future? If they are
| signed up through to Slow Social via FB, can they still log
| in manually if their FB account has been deleted?
| loceng wrote:
| I see it as more of providing a false signal of adoption
| or success: if people need the friction to be as little
| as clicking a single button to "sign up" then they're not
| very convinced or committed to trying something new and
| likely not willing to invest time actually engaging with
| the system; all major platforms today used tricks or
| first mover mechanics for engagement to keep enough
| people on the platform long enough to make it sticky,
| rather than adding or creating or providing a wide
| breadth of usefulness/function to a wide variety of
| demographics - providing candy to the 80% at very low
| cost of ingredients vs. creating something of quality
| (product and service); dumb inflammatory sugary candy vs.
| quality nutrients that is trying to milk clicks and time
| engaging on a platform attempting to control and retain a
| user every moment.
| judge2020 wrote:
| A lot of human time is sacrificed to maintain passwords
| for different websites; having a one-click sign in option
| saves a lot of people the time and headache of having to
| deal with a compromised account or forgotten password
| years in the future.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| It's really about reducing friction, not pumping up
| numbers. This is bootstrapped, not investor backed so
| there's no reason to skew the numbers.
|
| As for the candy analogy, I think that's a bit cynical if
| all you're critiquing is the login system without looking
| at the actual application. Lots of quality applications
| provide login via Facebook: Spotify, Notion, Airbnb, etc.
| It has nothing to do with the actual apps itself, it's
| just the doorway.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| You can also sign up with GitHub, Google, and email.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| How is it any different than old style blogging?
|
| The whole social network thing is a attention grabbing game.
| Blogging, on the other hand, is talking into the void: I don't
| need anyone. All past attempts to combined the best parts of both
| has been combining the worst part of both: no freedom of speech
| and no audience.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd argue it's different because it has better privacy
| controls. Instead of all your content being public, it's all
| private and you can share it to a non Slow Social member via
| email. Additionally, it's a more focused, concentrated
| experience.
|
| Otherwise, feel free to make blog posts. I think blogs are
| great.
| markstos wrote:
| Email has privacy controls and is decentralized. Just send
| HTML emails to the friends you want to get it.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Privacy is great; however requiring everyone to login adds
| frictions, which kill engagement.
|
| Anyway, it is always good to see someone challenging the
| status quo. Good luck.
| zaik wrote:
| Does this built on existing Internet standards like ActivityPub
| or XMPP?
| olah_1 wrote:
| This is awesome, but I'd like to see it built on top of something
| like https://Manyver.se (SSB) where the content lives on user
| devices!
| ryanschneider wrote:
| Honestly if this was geared towards teams inside a company I
| would probably lobby for it at my job. Have you considered an
| "enterprise option"? :)
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Something I hadn't considered. I'm not sure I'd go in that
| direction but I'm curious what this would look like. Are you
| thinking of something like a weekly status update on
| projects/etc?
| ryanschneider wrote:
| Ya exactly. Basically to replace daily status updates in
| slack or scrum or tickets or where ever.
| theplumber wrote:
| So it's a blogging app, right?
| jedberg wrote:
| I think your magic link is broken. I put in my email addy and got
| an email that said "click here to confirm your email" but there
| was no link.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| How long until this too succumbs to influencers or dies out?
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Buy my new book to find out! Or something along those lines.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| If I'm running it, I have no intentions of letting it become
| that way. The whole point of the product is that it's about
| friends and not influencers. People, not money. This is
| something for myself, my friends, and people like them more
| than.
|
| If Slow Social had any measure of great success I'd love to
| make it a B-Corp.
| civilized wrote:
| Respect the effort, but I think it's not going in quite the right
| direction. I don't think people need paternalistic restrictions
| on post frequency. People need to be liberated from engagement-
| optimizing algorithms and allowed to choose which activity is
| presented to them and in what order.
| chrischen wrote:
| I agree. What I'd like is to be given control so that I can at
| least work on _improving_ my social life and interactions. I
| want _pro software_ but for socializing. Something like my
| calendar app, email app, Photoshop, etc.
|
| Imagine if our email app changed their goal from empowering
| users to engaging users. We'd have email apps that surfaced
| only engaging emails you received and buried the rest. It would
| maximize our short term app usage engagement to the detriment
| of long term goals (getting work done). Gmail shows it's
| possible to meld good algorithms (spam detection) with good
| user empowering features, while also being an ad-supported
| model!
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I don't think your first and second sentence are necessarily in
| conflict with each other. In fact, Slow Social has no
| algorithms for engagement-optimizing, it's part of the design
| of the application.
|
| That being said, you absolutely _could_ be right on the
| restrictions on post frequency. Perhaps its not something any
| sort of large user base might not want. However, as far as I
| know it hasn't been tried before, and I think that makes it
| worth a shot.
|
| Lastly, it's possible that restrictions on post frequency serve
| a segment of the population that might be underserved by
| current social media, and its something those people would
| thrive one. At this point we can't say for sure, but I'd love
| to find out.
| civilized wrote:
| Slowing things down has the virtue of being a much easier
| means of social engineering than figuring out how to empower
| users to control the flow of content that comes to them. I
| only have some sketchy ideas of how exactly it would work.
|
| Definitely the starting point is to let users have a simple
| chronological option.
| linuxdude314 wrote:
| How does slowing things down make social engineering
| easier?
|
| That's a security term, and I'm not quite sure how it's
| relevant to the OP.
| civilized wrote:
| Social engineering isn't just a security term. The use in
| security is inherited from a broader and pre-existing
| concept. It's about setting up conditions that influence
| people to behave in a desired way.
| psyc wrote:
| I assume they mean herding cats.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think 'the algorithm' truly is the bogeyman of our time. Have
| you considered that it is precisely people themselves who crave
| engagement and that it is the often reviled paternalism which
| liberates people from following their worst instincts?
| civilized wrote:
| Paternalism isn't categorically bad but I see it as a last
| resort. People have never had the _option_ to filter out
| garbage from their feeds. If they did, there might be little
| _need_ for paternalism.
| moffkalast wrote:
| People crave engagement as much as they crave unhealthy food.
| Having a person stand behind you at all times with an
| infinite amount of the exact kind of burger you like isn't
| gonna help make you get thinner lol. And that's like the
| whole point of personalization algorithms.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > isn't gonna help make you get thinner lol.
|
| sure as hell isn't but do you actually think the reason 65%
| of the American population is overweight is burger ads,
| rather than the simple fact that people unless very
| explicitly told not to will stuff their faces with cheap
| and delicious fast food? Do you think that requires
| coercion? Like in a world where McDonalds doesn't run ads,
| they all start working out and eat salads?
|
| The algorithm itself only exists to satisfy a never-ending
| demand by people, it's nothing else than an internet
| conveyor belt.
|
| When you walk into Twitter HQ and turn the algorithms off
| you think the people will greet you in the streets as
| liberators with flowers and open arms? You'll have a riot
| because Instagram and TikTok don't work any more
| [deleted]
| dansiemens wrote:
| I agree to some extent. The "medium is the message"; let the
| outcomes of post frequency be determined by the structure of
| the platform. Whether that structure should be more
| prescriptive than descriptive though is certainly up for
| debate.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think the idea of paternalism comes from seeing people harm
| themselves by undertaking actions they were manipulated into
| taking, and confusing that with actions they'd have done on
| their own, independently.
| civilized wrote:
| What I object to is we skipped straight from exploitation to
| paternalism. Freedom was never an option on offer.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have WhatsApp/iMessage groups for immediate friends and
| family who I don't mind getting real time updates from.
| Everyone else, I am okay with periodically contacting as
| desired via text/audio/video call.
|
| It seems pretty liberated, and I am not sure what more a social
| network website could offer. Outside of about 5 people, I have
| no interest in real time updates...I can wait to see photo
| albums next time I call or visit, like in the times before
| broadband. In fact I prefer it, so that there is a jumping off
| point for things to talk about.
| civilized wrote:
| I have the family SMS group as well.
|
| I can't imagine having much use for a social network after
| all these years of social networks being awful, but maybe a
| truly different and more liberated one would offer some
| possibilities.
| [deleted]
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| One way to look at it is a restriction on post frequency, but
| the reason why modern social is so harmful is because unlimited
| post frequency means unlimited read frequency.
|
| It isn't restricted post frequency, it is restricted read
| frequency.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, I definitely thought of this. It's kindof a chicken or
| the egg thing. Some of my friends had the suggestion of a
| weekly digest or something like that.
|
| In the end, I opted for this since, from my perspective,
| there's a sort of solace knowing that I'm only "expected" to
| write at most once a week.
| civilized wrote:
| I must be some sort of freak libertarian. People are always
| talking about how they want or need their lifestyle to
| force them to do this and that. I would always rather have
| the choice.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| It is a choice. The choice is: I will only write/read
| once a week, that is you making a choice about how you
| want to allocate time.
| sunshi23 wrote:
| What value does this provide at all? This reminds me of Chinese
| online games will block teenagers at night. (Fang Chen Mi )
| Except that the government forced all online games to do so.
| Because if some does some does not, teenagers just play the one
| that does not block them.
|
| Maybe we should build a system that have user's actual password
| to FB IG TWTR TIKTOK, and user only has password to that system
| and when they post go through that system as a proxy. Then the
| system can truly restrict the frequency of post.
|
| But this violates the term of service of all the social network
| listed above
| DreamFlasher wrote:
| Great work! Wish it were built on Mastodon and e2e encrypted.
| vmception wrote:
| Minutiae seems to do this decently
|
| Lets you use the app for one minute a day at a random time, and
| during that minute you get to see a random users old feed
|
| You might think it's a different use case, but i think it's
| tackling the same problem and in a more succinct and simpler way
|
| https://minutiae-app.org/faqs
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| This is a really interesting concept!
|
| I'm trying to solve the problem of creating space for people to
| share more thoughtful, potentially longer form content, while
| this seems to be solving for transient "what are you doing
| right now" type content. I'd say they're different enough, but
| both seem to be a reaction to similar concepts.
| vmception wrote:
| Try it out! Maybe you can incorporate it into your sentiment
| of solving this goal for a broader population
|
| I know some people whose lives it changed by not being able
| to curate their images they post during their 1 minute (a
| prerequisite to viewing others images in the 1 minute). They
| realized they were sitting at a desk every time and didnt
| want their life to be that way so it was a catalyst to taking
| more drastic steps to doing something else.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Hey everyone, OP here.
|
| I, like many others tend to waffle between loving and hating
| social media, so this is my take on what I think a better
| solution looks like. This is something I've been working on for
| the past couple of months and a concept that I think will be
| though provoking, if nothing else, to the HN community. If you
| want to read more on my thoughts and the story behind this, you
| can check out my blog post here:
| https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
|
| Besides that, I'm happy to answer questions and take criticism.
| mind-blight wrote:
| I'm really curious what your business model is and how you make
| money. I looked under those sections on the about page, but
| they don't actually answer the question.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| The app is just launching, and it's a side hustle. Everything
| right now can run on a free tier, and I'm fairly certain I
| can support a _very_ sizeable amount of users for < $100 of
| operating overhead, which is cash I'd totally be willing to
| spare if I had thousands of users enjoying the app.
|
| But, if I get there, the plan would be to explore charging
| something reasonable for a plus tier which would offer more
| formatting options, more pictures per post, and a couple
| other things, for something nominal like $3 of a month. That
| could help cover the overhead, and maybe would result in some
| cash on the side.
| and0 wrote:
| I think there's a lot of honesty and practicality in your
| response but not the transparency or clarity needed for
| this to scale. These networks require buy-in / critical
| mass to function as intended, and not knowing if I (or my
| friends) will agree to the pricing terms after I get my
| network on board is a hard stop for me.
|
| I do like the idea. Well designed limitations can add a lot
| of appeal, and in social spaces especially they can be fun
| to play within.
| ada1981 wrote:
| None of the other social networks you were an early
| adopter of told your their future monetization plans did
| they?
| and0 wrote:
| The two that I used to maintain personal connections and
| communicate in ways worth archiving were Myspace and
| Facebook. For Myspace I was a teen. Same with Facebook.
| My connections were from school so if either disappeared
| I'd just have to talk to them the next day. Also both had
| attained critical mass at some sort of scale by the time
| they popped up on my radar, and were fairly new ideas so
| it's not like I was able to shop around. I just went
| where my friends were.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| If it hasn't been mentioned, you should learn from the social
| media app Path.
|
| It limited the amount of friends you could have. As a result,
| people didn't add friends because they didn't want to give up a
| space for a potential future connection. The scarcity worked
| against Path.
|
| You might find the same result where people won't post because
| they'll be afraid of using up their allotment when they may
| have a better one later.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Thanks, that's a good tip! I'll definitely check them out.
|
| And yup, definitely a concern. Makes me think that perhaps
| there's a possibility to not cap the posts, but rather have
| any posts outside of the first one in a week have something
| like a "secondary" tag. Then again, you might run into the
| problem that Instagram has where everyone stopped posting as
| soon as stories caught on.
|
| Alas, it's a tricky problem.
| adfm wrote:
| Attenuate with a temporal component. Share short bursty
| material with the people you frequently interact with and
| dither out over time. Pin things you want your infrequent
| contacts to see. You keep your "free" speech while slowing
| the spread of batshit insane brain worms naturally.
| pjerem wrote:
| Why not just allow your users to write their weekly post
| during all the week (and saving it while not publishing it)
| but just allowing to publish once a week ?
|
| In doing so, there would be no real scarcity for the writer
| (the post can be edited to the infinity) and you encourage
| writing long prose.
|
| Your UX should show that editing the post is the default
| option and publishing it should be some ritual (maybe send
| a notification when it is possible?)
| Husafan wrote:
| I think the weekly post idea really applies to the reader,
| not the writer. Perhaps you could get around this with a
| "digest" style of posting. I.e. I can write as many posts
| as I want, but it will only be published once a week as a
| digest of posts. This might fit better with human behavior
| too as it lowers the cost of a single post while still
| achieving the goal of updating friends on what's happening
| at a spaced interval.
|
| Anyway, love the idea. Good luck!
| prismatix wrote:
| Maybe you can only see one post per friend per week in
| the feed, but then you can click into their profile to
| see the whole of their posts.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I would definitely not cap the posts, nor would I limit in
| any way their consumption. If I have something to say, why
| should I not be able to? And if I am interested in what
| someone does, I don't want to wait for a week to read it.
|
| That said, it is important how the posts are presented. A
| person who posts all the time about each plate of food...
| might not be as interesting as another friend who writes
| only once a month, but usually about really interesting
| things. A good UI which puts control in the hands of the
| consumer (but easy to use - convenience matters) is the
| most important thing here imho.
|
| Best of luck!
| metamet wrote:
| The ability to edit the weekly post seems like it could
| remedy this. Would probably see folks embrace the
| journaling approach by using headers to timestamp them.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| That would be great!
|
| I'm sick of articles needing follow ups or corrections
| instead get a separate, unlinked post.
|
| Articles become stale but they get shared and referenced
| as if they're the final point on the subject.
| subpixel wrote:
| This is exactly the app idea I pitched my wife with the working
| title "What's Happening". Which she had turned into a joke at
| my expense. I wish you luck!
| [deleted]
| murphyslab wrote:
| The rate limitation sounds good for a general audience of one's
| connections, but there are a lot of times when life calls for
| more frequent updates, particularly in times of emergency and
| medical crisis where the changes to one's life circumstances
| change by the day, if not by the hour. Posting, "Andy is in the
| hospital", then needing to wait a week to post, "Andy died 1
| hour after being admitted to the hospital". One suggestion
| might be to allow posts to be threaded, so that updates to an
| initial post can be added without waiting an entire week.
| bityard wrote:
| Not the OP but I think the answer for this is that
| communication of medical/health issues is best handled by a
| more private form of media.
| murphyslab wrote:
| For medical issues, I agree that private is usually best;
| or at least restricted to close friends and family.
| Imminent death often has an adjacent position, where people
| commonly wish to share with a broader audience.
|
| However it was just an example of an emergency where one
| might strongly desire to update a broad range of friends
| and family quickly. Other situations might be natural
| disasters or a house fire where one "We're alive!" post
| might require a follow-up the next day with more details,
| needs, or grief.
|
| It's just to say that an unyielding, global rate limit
| would not serve peoples' interests well.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| I sometimes wonder whether our goal of making everything
| as convenient & frictionless as possible is part of our
| problem. By serving _some_ of our short-term interests,
| are we jeopardizing our long-term interests?
|
| I'm personally okay with seeing products that have well-
| intended friction built into them.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't have skin in this game and will probably never use
| it anyways, but to me that is a non starter for this whole
| project. Why would I want to limit how often my friends can
| post? The problem with FB isn't that my friends post to
| much, it's that I never see what my _friends_ post.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I'd want to use both. Using private media is more reliable
| if you remember everyone relevant but that's hard.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| One post per week is too limiting!! There are days when I want
| to talk to or mention 10 friends!
| manmal wrote:
| Why not IM those friends?
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| FYI: when I gave my email address to sign up, the very bare
| email that hit my gmail inbox went straight to spam.
|
| You're going to need to do more to keep it on the 'not spam'
| list, I think.
| ccorcos wrote:
| Have you talked to Joe Edelman? He would have all kinds of good
| ideas for you.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Who is Joe Edelman?
| ada1981 wrote:
| Def talk to Joe Edelman.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Looks great and love the concept. What's the tech stack behind
| it?
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'm using Supabase, Sveltekit, Tailwind, SendGrid, and
| Netlify.
|
| SvelteKit has been a lot of fun but definitely has a few
| rough edges. Supabase has been awesome, but as you can
| probably see, from the comments elsewhere, has some kinks
| around magic link based authentication.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Facebook without comments or statuses or groups or likes would be
| a pretty good social network. I'd also only show mutual friends.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Anyone interested building a social network should read:
| https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
|
| tl;dr - There is a specific reason that we like to use social
| networks, and it's the receiving of status or accumulate capital.
| From this theory, a network like Slow Social cannot succeed
| because there isn't enough social capital that can be consumed.
| charcircuit wrote:
| One big issue with this model is that you can't build an
| audience. You can't make friends. What's the point of using the
| site when all of your posts go to the void. Even if you add a
| friend all of those posts you worked hard on are gone.
|
| If it takes a long time before there is new content to see, why
| would people visit the site instead of forgetting about it? How
| are you going to make it a rabbit for people to go there?
| xixixao wrote:
| This is true for messaging social networks and they thrive. I
| don't think this is necessarily a huge blocker.
| tsuujin wrote:
| You make friends in real life and then include them in this
| platform, not the other way around. Not building an audience
| seems to be a feature.
|
| I view this as a great way to keep in touch with people you
| actually know.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, this is basically my take. Not everyone will feel like
| this, but I often find I have enough friends, but not great
| ways to connect with them in online spaces. In other words,
| I'd rather build a tool that helps people understand and
| relate to each other, not a tool that connects people to
| others who have the capacity to understand and relate to them
| but might not necessarily already be in their lives.
| flipdot wrote:
| I tried to sign up, but the confirmation email got automarked as
| spam by Gmail and didn't contain any links.
| walterclifford wrote:
| Same, you have to not only tell gmail it looks safe but also
| mark it as not phishing (from the three dot dropdown), then it
| will be in your inbox AND have a link to click.
| flipdot wrote:
| Thanks! First time dealing with this Gmail's "feature".
| (deg[?]deg`)
| lobstey wrote:
| just like the WeChat way of dealing moments.
| kqr wrote:
| > The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, the model isn't to
| maximize profit like an investor backed startup, but rather to
| create a lean, useful piece of software that grows with its users
| and can sustain itself from every angle from day one.
|
| If the owners are separate from the users, it's not set up for
| sustainability. If someone other than the users bear the risk of
| loss and upside of profits, it creates weird incentives whether
| you want it to or not.
|
| Have you considered running it as a co-op? Every user has an
| equal stake in costs and profits and an equal voice in decisions.
| This model literally grows with its users, and it's the only one
| that does so.
|
| I like this but it sounds like you've chosen the wrong model for
| running it. If I was going to use something like this (which I
| would like to, I think, if nothing else to share updates with
| families/close friends) I would want to own it equally with the
| other users.
| simulate-me wrote:
| Has any technical product ever organized as a co op and been
| successful? Such a weird criticism...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Quite a few!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative
|
| I think it's a valid concern to ask about incentive alignment
| - if you're wanting to do a tech-for-good project, you
| probably want to make sure that profiteering doesn't become
| the primary driver at a later date by making a Ulysses pact
| [1].
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| It's not a weird criticism. May not be unrealistic to be a
| co-op, fine that's difficult. But don't lie and say there's
| no profit incentive to be had when there clearly is if owners
| of the platform are separate from individual users
| itslennysfault wrote:
| The jury is obviously still out, but I think The Drivers
| Cooperative is pretty successful, and I'm optimistic that it
| will continue to be.
|
| https://drivers.coop/
| planb wrote:
| Has any social network ever focused on users well-being and
| been successful? I think it's not criticism but an
| interesting idea.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I too, am curious. It seems like Mastodon and other
| federated networks definitely have user well being and
| autonomy as a goal. However, for whatever reason, most of
| the more popular federated networks seem to aspire to be
| "X, but federated" instead of having drastically different
| user experiences.
| mr90210 wrote:
| What an idea!
| nsomaru wrote:
| I'm not sure how this works in the US but I would be worried
| about attracting liability for what happens on the platform.
|
| How does that work?
| gglon wrote:
| That is exactly why I think one post per week and lack of
| global space is a great solution for a startup; it massively
| simplifies spam and other hostile content early detection and
| removal.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| That's an interesting idea! No I haven't considered that.
| B-Corp is what I was imagining, but a co-op is a great idea as
| well.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Lovely concept. Have a look at the work Commonwealth have
| done on digital platform cooperatives. https://www.common-
| wealth.co.uk/reports/digital-co-ops-and-t...
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| Couchsurfing converted to a B-corp, but that didn't work out
| well (for the members). I think co-op would put the emphasis
| back on the member experience and would have prevented
| Couchsurfing from killing its community and ruining its
| brand. CS also claimed that the B-corp meant it couldn't
| accept donations or do open source development, though I have
| no idea if that was true.
|
| If you go for co-op, you could go one further and try for a
| non-profit co-op: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/nonprofit-
| coop-66008.html
| civilized wrote:
| RStudio, in my opinion one of the greatest companies in the
| world today, is a public benefit corp.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| There are several advocacy groups that could help out:
|
| https://ioo.coop (Internet of Ownership Coop) (Edit:
| currently down, a snapshot is available at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211207224925/http://ioo.coop/ )
|
| https://platform.coop (Platform Cooperativism site)
|
| A good short read on the topic could be Nick Srnicek's
| Platform Capitalism; it covers concisely a lot of the
| economics involved.
| severak_cz wrote:
| I like the idea of experimenting with a different styled social
| network.
|
| I have built one such network myself. It's called Kyselo and it's
| for refugees from now-defunct social network Soup.io.
|
| It's very different from today's social network in these things:
|
| - it has strictly chronological timeline
|
| - everything (except DM) is public (this makes leaks from
| seemingly private spaces impossible)
|
| - but it encourages pseudonyms
|
| - you can colour/style your profile page as you like - see for
| example my page - https://kyselo.eu/severak
|
| - it's small and mostly meme based
|
| Small userbase size and chronological timeline makes it very time
| saving (except when you are trying to find a right meme in your
| collection :-D).
|
| It works fine for me but it will need some polishing before it's
| open to wide public. Now it's in semi-open beta (you have to ask
| me for invitation code).
| chetanbhasin wrote:
| Tried to sign up but got the rate limit error.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Oh, fascinating. Was it a Supabase thing? I haven't run into
| that before. If you have any more details, I'd love to hear.
| You could comment here or email team@slowsocial.us
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Good stuff! Keep going!
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| "Frequently asked questions
|
| What's your business model?
|
| The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, [...]
|
| How do you make money?
|
| The goal of the company is to equally value the customer,
| environment, and profits. In other words, [...]"
|
| What?
|
| https://slowsocial.us/about#business-model
| davesque wrote:
| I'm assuming that was a typo?
| [deleted]
| Qahlel wrote:
| As the world becomes a more digital place, we cannot forget
| about the human connection.
|
| If you're going to build a business that's based on community,
| your business has to have community in it.
|
| If your business is the right business, then money will never
| be an issue.
| amelius wrote:
| Market has been spoiled, everybody thinks social media should
| be free as in beer.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah, there's a bad copypasta there. I'll see if I can update
| that real quick.
|
| EDIT: The FAQ has been updated.
| bfrog wrote:
| I kind of love it, but it sort of feels like the burn of social
| networks at this point is less about the bite sized crap stream
| and more that some entity now has my social network and interests
| saved for the purpose of targeting ads. Ads are the evil that
| drives the crap to keep us doom scrolling. Has this somehow found
| another revenue stream? Ads as a revenue stream is the issue, not
| the size or rate of posting.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Low overhead costs and charging users something like $3/mo
| would be the target for sustainability if the network ever
| starts to have significant operating expenses. Until then, it's
| really cheap to keep running.
| [deleted]
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Great to see more ideas in this space! A few years back my wife
| and I tried something kinda similar, Sundayy. We even launched on
| HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848793
|
| Some people still use Sundayy but it didn't really take off. I am
| really glad we did it, but I'll admit it got less exciting to
| work on when most users would fizzle out after a few weeks. My
| gut feel on why is that we didn't do enough to compete with the
| dopamine drip feeding of typical social networks. Social networks
| are (amongst other things) a way to kill time and we didn't offer
| that. This made it hard for users to make Sundayy core to their
| lives unless they were really committed, and then even if they
| did that it wasn't very rewarding if none of their friends were
| equally committed.
|
| For me personally I stopped using the product when I had some big
| personal news I needed to keep secret for a few months. It was
| very hard to write about other stuff on Sundayy because it was
| all I thought about. So I ended up writing nothing and broke the
| habit. That sucked - maybe I'll pick it up again now I think
| about it.
|
| Good luck OP. I hope this gives insight into some challenges you
| might face. I don't have solutions to these challenges but
| hopefully you find some :) If you want to chat more on the topic
| feel free to reach out by email.
| [deleted]
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| This is really cool! And those are some great insights. I just
| might send you an email.
| noobermin wrote:
| Sorry for the nitpick but the f in the typeface they chose is
| unfortunately distracting for normal text.
| felipemesquita wrote:
| Nice to see what I think is a trix[0] editor for the rich text
| posts.
|
| [0] https://trix-editor.org/
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yup! It's Trix alright. I was pretty amazed out how heavy and
| complicated most rich text editors are. But then again, it's a
| pretty complex interaction they have to design around.
| ubicomp wrote:
| Re-doing social networks based on one size fits all social
| activity streams seems like it's going in the wrong direction.
| Especially since these social shapes typically necessitate
| funding requirements like ads or pay to play.
|
| I wonder when we'll go back to forums to connect. Earlier "slow
| social" methods (mailing lists / message boards). Forums can be
| free. People can self-host. They can run for years and years and
| years. Folks can organize around a single subject or a series of
| subjects and grow together over time at various levels of
| engagement without resorting to a one size fits all model that
| social networks force on users.
|
| I really enjoyed running forums for my friends. I never had to
| pay giant server fees because it was just a few of us. We had
| 100K page views per month. We never had to have ads. We had forum
| permissions and mods and a lot of fun times.
|
| I see Discord being similar to this vs. social media, where you
| can slowly join communities and get nearer to the core. More of
| an onion model of community. I'm looking forward to seeing what
| happens in this space.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| > Especially since these social shapes typically necessitate
| funding
|
| I would actually argue, that with today's technologies and
| cloud offerings, this isn't necessarily true. The operating
| costs for a high availability sites aren't all that high. You
| can easily support a million users for under $1000 a month. The
| real cost to most other social networks is the need to generate
| infrastructure and growth engines around returning investment
| to venture capitalists and other stakeholders.
|
| But regarding your other points, I definitely sympathize. I've
| actually tried to get my friends onto forums, and thoroughly
| enjoy Discord. Slow Social, however, is for a niche that I
| don't think those other options fully serve.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| What a fabulous idea! I'll bet Zuckerberg hates it, which makes
| it even better.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I'd be amazed if the Zuck ever heard about it.
|
| Also, I think this is something that could co-exist with Insta,
| Facebook, and WhatsApp.
| AndrewSChapman wrote:
| "4. WHEN AND WITH WHOM DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?
|
| Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in
| which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy
| notice. Affiliates include our parent company and any
| subsidiaries, joint venture partners, or other companies that we
| control or that are under common control with us."
|
| I would much prefer that this simply read: We do not share your
| information with anyone.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I don't plan on sharing personal information with any sort of
| entity, certainly not for profit. But, the personal information
| is stored on machines and manipulated by other companies,
| namely Supabase and SendGrid since its necessary for the site
| to function.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's admirable that you're aware of the risk you're placing
| on your users, and willing to assuage them. If you're
| audience is HN, you might want to simply list the 3rd party
| runtime components you're using (and to go one better, review
| _their_ privacy notices, recursively -- I can imagine a
| malefactor doing a backroom deal with a component provider to
| get kickbacks on data being shared down the line.) I would
| also include any front end components in this notice, like
| Cloudflare or GA.
|
| Last but not least, it would be nice to know who's behind
| this, because none of these assurances mean anything if
| you're _really_ a malefactor. I would recommend putting a
| real name or two in your "About" page.
| hn_user2 wrote:
| If this is the case, I would recommend a stronger word than
| "affiliate". My data is always being sold to marketing
| affiliates.
| fridental wrote:
| Never ever I would sign up into a social network that doesn't
| publish any real-world contacts. Who are you, guys? Americans?
| Russians? Chinese? Why should I trust you with my online life, if
| I don't even know, where you live, what are your names and how
| your faces looks like?
|
| And, in Germany, publishing of the real-world information is
| mandatory.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >And, in Germany, publishing of the real-world information is
| mandatory.
|
| thankfully, nobody outside Germany has to give a fuck about
| German laws
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Safe to assume they're not Germans, then! ;]
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I mean, there's an email address and, if your really curious,
| you could have read the blog post linked in the main site that
| has my name associated with it.
|
| https://dev.to/duensing/introducing-slow-social-4a90
|
| But I see the larger point, there's trust that needs to be
| built, but I think the standards are going to be different for
| different people. The German legal requirements are also
| something I didn't know about. I do my best to protect and
| guard the personal information, and only request what's
| directly relevant for the app.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Also, I'm American and all the data is being stored
| stateside.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> all the data is being stored stateside.
|
| Which brings up all manner of privacy issues for those not
| stateside.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| waveywaves wrote:
| If rich text formatting is your feature proposal for a social
| media network should I even care about it. Users care about a
| larger abstracted view about what you can do differently with
| what you can do with the smn interface. Flaunting rich text
| formatting feels like a core developer's achivement rather than a
| technology achievement. Do correct me if I am wrong.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I think what I was trying to get across is that you can do
| things more in a blog post styles as opposed to Twitter style
| quick bites. But maybe you're right it's not worth mentioning.
| The copy for the site hasn't gone through any focus group
| testing or anything like that.
| civilized wrote:
| I think it's a good feature. The FB text box is almost
| insulting in its lack of features and options.
| [deleted]
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