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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative

I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.

Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

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I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.

> Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

I've been doing something similar. If your network is decentralized, I've been thinking monetization can be in the form of easy VM reselling for the service. Find a provider w/ affiliate $, integrate it into setup. They are the owners of the AWS (or whatever) account and everything's transparent, but you make it easy to install/upgrade. Or could hide the host details and be the "server manager" for them, i.e. managed hosting.

If you are centralized, there are several other ways. You can do a simple one like "completely free to use for companies < $1m revenue/year, $100/month otherwise" (wild number guesses, would need research). Other options can get a bit more sketchy, ala freemium/addons, e.g. pay to style your page, etc.

You could try indiscriminately selling users data.

>Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.

The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).

Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.

You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines.

Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.

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