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Comment by ishanjain28 | Hacker News Reader

This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful).

Why would I want to use this?

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In the bay area, I have hundreds of acquaintances that are burners, hippies, makers, etc. I've been keeping up with these folks for nearly two decades now and would like to continue to do so as they have enriched my life immeasurably. Many of us get together on at least a yearly basis and often do special events together. All the other tools that we would've used to communicate and coordinate with each other have died in favor of facebook.

So, there's one use case.

That's too bad.

I'm lucky -- in my area, the burners, hippies, and makers don't use Facebook for coordination. They have mailing lists for that.

I suspect the community here is just too large for something like a mailing list. I mean, there are mailing list, but they're less generalized than I like.

I've never done anything useful with an IDE as a Ruby developer. Why do IDEs like IntelliJ even exist? I personally don't have a need for them, and I refuse to understand that other people have different needs and wants.

I enjoy some of the content I find on Instagram from interesting individuals and companies. But for me the value of Facebook is its ubiquity - nothing comes close to it for being able to contact old friends from other countries, from schools, from various social circles, etc.

And for that reason the "quietly launched" thing here kinds of defeats the point of any Facebook rival for me.

This very site is a specialized social network...

Reddit is a big social network with many specialized groups.

The (sparse) descriptions of wt.social sound more like a variant of Reddit than anything else.

But the presentation is horrible.

Now one can follow celebrities on instagram, facebook with their daily updates:)

Okay point taken.

Although, The "celebrities"(I am more interested in following Engineers, Computer Scientists. These guys are my "celebrities") I would want to follow are not on facebook/instagram(Or they don't share anything I'd be interested in on those platforms).

keeping in touch with family & friends - email, MMS, etc don't work.

This is pretty much the only thing I use FB for, and even here it's not that much. It lets me keep tabs on people I rarely communicate with, and gives me a way to easily communicate with them if I want to say "hi" after a year of no communication. For people I'm not that close with (not enough to exchange phone numbers), it lets me keep a list of these mere acquaintances.

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