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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to make a dumb social network which could import friends/photos/videos from a Facebook export.

Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts.

Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.

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Serious question: How would such a platform be significantly better than email? I'm genuinely curious as to what features of social networks people think can't be fulfilled by email. The only issue I have with email is convincing other people to use it for sharing their life, rather than/as well as on Facebook, but I would have exactly the same problem with a brand new social network.

Just that you can post something and then your circle of friends / family can view your post. At their own leisure. You don't have to write an email and send it to people and such, and try figure out which friends want to see it and which don't.

IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.

What if it was easy to manage mailing lists? So my email provider allowed my friends to subscribe to my mailing list if they want to hear from me, and unsubscribe when they don't.

The good thing about email is: * Everybody has it, * It's decentralized, we don't need to all agree on one company, * There's a lot of clients for reading it already, and everybody can choose their favourite, * If I own my domain, I can change providers transparently, * etc.

I can't imagine any of that working for my inlaws and such.

But thinking about this, what if (assuming this was an open source social network) there was a data source hook. For example:

When I create my account, I could say "Get my data from X, and send my data to Y". Where I can expose an API on... AWS Api Gateway. Then when you visit my feed/wall, it pulls the data from that source. The only thing the social network stores is the API, and any Auth criteria. Then (Say I owned "Dumb Social Network") I don't own your data, you do, I just provide a place to display it.

If you don't want to use your own source for data then I can store it for you, but I may limit what I store to protect myself as a company (like GDPR)

I agree my family couldn't handle it currently, but I think that's a UX problem rather thana protocol problem. I've often fantasized about creating a social network that just creates an inbox for each user and then sends emails for each post, and then later "opening it up" by revealing it's really just email.

This project will likely be of interest to you - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

> The good thing about email is: * Everybody has it, *

This is not necessarily the case. For a considerable portion of humanity getting online these days, social networks are the internet for them and they might not use email at all. Even in places where email is a thing, many young people these days don’t have email unless and until they go to university.

I applaud this idea, but once you've joined how do you get your friends to follow you? Every so often I get emails like: "Bob invites you to join AwesomeSocialNetwork, click here to join!" and I totally ignore them.

I also wonder if the age of The Social Network is over. If a new better Facebook did come along, people wouldn't join it because deep down they all know that social networking is massive waste of time and will always end up being an endless stream of garbage. The only reason they've not all left Facebook yet, is fear of missing out.

Social networking was never a waste of time. The fact that both of us don't know each other still exchanging ideas is a proof of that. Online social networking gave us the power to find people we might not find otherwise in an all offline world. It all got screwed up when the business models came into play and we became 'products' instead of 'users'. We made https://pden.xyz because we felt a stripped down version of a social network with no like, share counts would work better for us.

I saw your link elsewhere in this thread.

Pden is a decentralized microblogging app

What does that mean exactly? Without any screen-shots or detailed information I'm none the wiser as to why I should try your service. I'm certainly not handing over my email address without more information. Just a bit of UI feedback there.

I understand your point. Decentralized in the sense that we don't own your data or identity. It is owned and controlled by the user. Identities are verified by blockchain and all your data is stored in the cloud storage of your choice. As far as more information is concerned we have listed all the important points in the landing page which we felt was necessary. If you have any specific questions you can ask and we'll try best to answer that.

We even have likes (with the thumbs up image to click on) on our company wiki. It's all so stupid.

Wasn't that MySpace? Facebook superseded that model because the general public prefers Facebook.

A lot of people like this idea, but it seems that no one really wants to implement it.

I would love to build it. Open source. But I suck at design so I donno.

That's what I felt while leaving facebook. Then we built this because we were frustrated. Just check if this suits you https://pden.xyz

Or something like binky [1] but with your friends data, and no notification of interaction

[1](https://www.binky.rocks/)

Exactly.. Kinda go back to the basics of what facebook was back in the day.

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