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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

If I may, a decentralized alternative to facebook would be community-based, allow people to do group chats, discover and post events, see attendees, meet each other, add each other to contacts, maybe even drive each other to the events, date, book group reservations at local businesses etc.

Like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Yes that’s my project. Would love to get feedback.

(The things I mentioned above are actually social things, the main thing that distinguishes them is that they are taking place in the future and group collaboration online is always leading to a goal. Anything that doesn’t satisfy those two criteria is more about socializing online than offline.)

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FWIW, I did a survey of people asking which features from Facebook that absolutely must have to consider switching to a replacement. As much as people say the events, chats, and local community features are important... exactly zero people checked those boxes in my survey results. Pretty much the only thing people checked was 'connect with friends'

Worth noting that what users say they will do and what they actually end up doing frequently diverge.

Here's my advice:

You've missed the point and likely didn't do validation before building this (if you have).

I don't want 1,000 features from launch. Facebook didn't start out doing everything they do today, neither should you. Copying another service won't win you users because maybe users don't like that feature or how it works.

I want something that solves a problem without unnecessary doohickeys glued on to it.

So basically throw out everything you've suggested and start over. What does a social network mean in 2018? What pain point can you solve easily without a lot of work?

Don't spend more time on this than you need to, to get it in front of users who will tell you whether they will like it or not.

Facebook may not have started doing everything they're doing now, but they do have it now. Any new competitor is not going to be judged based on what Facebook was 10 years ago; they're going to be judged against it now.

I think the point is facebook didn't have everything myspace did when they started but brought in users for what it offered. What they offered was a semi-private network for your college. Very local. Only later did they open up to all.

It was the UI.

MySpace UI was terrible. You just can't allow regular people to edit CSS of their profiles.

MySpace was like high school, FB was like college. More grown up and sophisticated. Exclusivity was part of it.

Qbix has a few million active users, apparently.

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