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I agree as well that protocols would be the answer. I don't believe in it though. There are two very large groups of people who make every attempt in this direction fail. Yes, even things that apparently succeeded already (like email) are always fighting an uphill battle against these two groups.

Group one are the Trumps and Putins. The guys who want to control everything. They always want to centralize everything with themselves standing at the top. Sadly a lot of people with power/money are like that.

Group two are the dont-care folks. The ones that sign up to every next facebook because they don't care if their data is misused. The ones that make jokes about Zuckerberg today, but still use FB. They won't put up with the slightest bit of uncoolness or usability discomfort no matter what harm it does to their freedoms.

Sadly both these groups work very well together. Basically I gave up hope that anything reasonable can be achieved as long as both these exist. There's only the option to join either group and live with what these groups bring with them.

to be fair, usually it's not just the "slightest bit of... usability discomfort" but an enormous chunk. (e.g. Mastodon is hilariously complicated and difficult to understand for me and I can't even imagine trying to get my friends to use it.)

Being mobile-only ensures that the network will only consist of pictures and low-effort posts. That's fine, there's a bigger market for Instagram competitors than for social networks with substance. But between that and the video that consisted almost solely of liking cat pictures makes it obvious that it's not for me.

It seems quite a bit like reddit. Just subscribe to outdoorsy and cat subreddits and you've got it

Yeah, as someone who carries neither iOS or Android devices, app only social networks won't ever pick me up.

It's worse... Once you've signed up through mobile, you can use it from any browser. Makes you wonder why it wants you to sign up on mobile... Wants your phone number? Wants access to you contacts?

A perfectly good explanation is deterring spammers.

I'm frankly not interested to be part of an exclusive social media thing where only people who have phones can participate.

I recommend you check out what a click farm looks like: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=click%20farm

I know what they look like, but I also know about services like Sift Science. I used "deterring" rather than stronger words for a reason. On a couple of former teams, I had to deal occasionally with spammer scum.

Mobile only signup does nothing to deter spammers.

Easy enough to fake your user agent. Or is it a native app with extra security / checks?

I thought we were talking about phone numbers. They're not impossible to obtain in bulk, but that's much harder than faking user agents.

If they wanted to verify my phone number, text me a code. That isn't a problem. It's the app install requirement we're talking about. Which both gives them access to some data on your phone, and also means only Android and iOS users can sign up.

(On Android, Hello gets access to your contacts, your rough location, the ability to read and modify your storage, use your camera, and view your Wi-Fi connections)

Read and Modify Storage and Camera permissions are needed so that it can take pictures, presumably to post (Why so many Android apps think they need to be their own camera instead of just dumping out to the user's preferred camera app I'll never understand). Everything else seems pretty sketchy.

Well, and as you point out, the camera permission is arguably completely specious. Android should, if I recall, also have a photo picker so you can select a single photo to give to the app, rather than giving it global access to your stuff.

I understand why it wants contacts, to make it easy to add people, but again, it can be done in a "let the OS offer the contact picker" way, if we're making a privacy-respecting app.

If Google is expected to be the steward of protecting users, they should not allow apps on the Play Store which don't use the most privacy-respecting method possible to implement the needed functionality.

What else? I assume that the whole reddit thing is the same. Install our app so we can suck your phone dry of your personal data.

You do not need to install the reddit apps ever. You can sign up, and use it, through their web interface.

In fact when I use reddit from my phone (through Firefox) I force it to use the non-mobile version as I find it much faster (as long as you open every link in a new tab).

So websites now no longer simply want new users, they want unique,verified users.

I understand the need for such verification when a webmaster wants to prevent easy re-registrations of trolls and/or banned members, and it's still better than Google's invite only system for when they release something big like gmail or g+, but it's a dark pattern all the way.

They pick you up because at least some, if not most of your friends are using app-only social networks that have access to their contacts and phone books. A few matching entries with your phone number and they have you pegged with a very high degree of certainty and connected to more than just your phone number and text messages. Everything your friends have in their contact info for you (birthday, email, home address, work address, family members, etc.). Obviously the same thing is true for your SMS/MMS messages that are sent to friends with app-only social networks which have access to their messages and call info. In the end you're giving away most of the same data, the difference is that you're just unable to benefit from it in the same way that you could with an Android or iOS device.

My hope is that killer apps will be used [1] more and more for decentralized platforms. Much like email became so popular - and still in use - I hope we eventually get to a state where centralized silos/platforms are thought of as silly; sort of what the AOL walled garden was.

[1] I stated "used" because there are plenty of apps (and underlying networks) related to decentralized social platforms that are already developed and in existence...more people simply have to make use of them.

> social protocols are the answer

While true, they probably won't be the first answer. You need a some of these networks with real traction (or at least one huge one) so they can derive a protocol from the greatest common factors between them. To preemtively make a protocol sans popular implementation has little value and often ends in low adoption. As we've learned, the success of a protocol is more about its popularity than its presence or quality. So I say let these networks gestate and once the market (of people, not money) starts picking winners, then begin your abstraction.

And for those (of us) working on solutions to this problem space now, keep going. You don't need a committee or standards doc or whatever. You just need an awesome impl.

Native app support might be too much to ask, but at least a webapp should be a major part of the launch time product.

It's fairly trivial to build a webapp around APIs that they've probably already developed for android/ios apps, so it's hard to forgive them for not having it ready by now.

Accessing Facebook through a Chrome/Chromium browser on an Android device allows you to make an app on your homescreen that's not nearly as invasive as the mobile app. That being said, the main difference will be improved battery life and less background processes running, as they'll gather most of your data from your friends on the receiving end of texts/calls/etc who are using the mobile app.

It's been around for a bit less than 2 years

It was launched in 2016. I guess it didn’t get much traction at the time to justify further development.