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Comment by psweber | Hacker News Reader

I fantasize about a product like that sometimes. A private, pay social site geared towards families. Your family pays a yearly subscription. Photo/video sharing. Event planning. Family news timeline. Everything purely linear. No manipulation to maximize engagement. No ads. Just real information about your family that you care about.

One side of my family has about 30 people that are all willing to travel to meet somewhere every few years. Compared to that expense, it would be trivial for us to share the cost of such a service, even if it were a few hundreds dollars a year.

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I've been saying for years I want to make it, but every time I suggest it I get laughed out of the room. I have a few totally "out there" startup ideas, this is one.

The thing about this is, every family has that one person who will pay for this and they keep it updated. Most family members will just lurk, but some will be totally into it.

I bet they would even take things off Facebook and repost in this app so that people off Facebook can see too.

Add to that network the ability to order physical printed copies of photos for cheap automatically sent to your house you could have a goldmine with people who still make photo albums/scrapbook.

You would have to only allow those in your family/inner circle the ability to order your photos but for families who use Facebook just to keep in touch/share baby photos having a social media centered around family groups could be lucrative.

This essentially already exists if you put a little effort into it. You could set up a Diaspora, Mastodon or Pixelfed instance open to just to family members in some cloud cloud provider, and this way pay a monthly fee for a private social network.

It'd be awesome to see someone contribute back some automatic flow which gets you up and running in 5 minutes, instead of having to figure out how to run these in AWS yourself, for example. Could be a fun project though.

Couldn't you self-host something that checks all those boxes for far less than a few hundred a year?

I'm building exactly this! It's a very early product, but please try out Thread - https://get.thread-app.com

I know it's probably one of the most difficult features to add -- especially for group messaging, but e2ee is a feature that will get you an instant user-base, who will then help network in more users. Just don't make it the main selling point (like Signal).

I'm probably doing to do this by hosting a private Mastodon instance in our basement. We already have a private Matrix instance for all of our family chats.

Like this? https://spokt.com/

I think Glassboard used to be something like this, but it never took off.

RIP Path.

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