Show HN: Slyde – A new social network, private by design | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Slyde – A new social network, private by design

slyde.network

7 pointsPaybackTony29 comments

Not sure I understand how this in the terms applies to copyrighted work that's uploaded: You further agree that we can use your User Content for any other purposes whatsoever in perpetuity without payment to you, and combine your User Content with other content for use within the Site and otherwise. We do not have to attribute your User Content to you.

Basically means that if you upload content for your connections or the public to see, we can show your friends / connections or the public (based on your settings) that content without paying you for it.

Yeah I'm always worried how poorly people understand this kind of legal stuff... I used to be a pro photographer, and even other pros didn't understand this kind of verbiage

Maybe say that then, instead of "for any other purposes whatsoever in perpetuity".

but it can basically also mean anything else!

I'd like to know more about this too.

My spidey senses tell me that Facebook and Twitter have begun periodically spinning off artificial competing shell orgs that resemble this service. They use the data gathered from signups to run demographic analysis on users who are likely to leave their platform, and can additionally point to these companies as evidence of existing competition in anti-trust cases. Parler, a so-called Twitter alternative that mysteriously won't publish its list of backers, is another good example of this type of company. What is a ham-sandwich photo and copypasta spammer to do?

We are most definitely not facebook algorithms. We actually posted a video on YouTube, hastily put together about why we made it. Though I can't really argue your logic.

this is a brilliant insight that i've never considered before but would probably bet my entire networth that it's the type of scummy/genius thing facebook would do.

Network effects are why even big players like Google fail to compete with Facebook or WhatsApp. Network effects are much more powerful than privacy concerns and stuff. Without a brilliant strategy to win market share, no technology can win that race. Embracing niches (universities or other special interest groups) and expanding from there seems to be a way to go. Would be nice to see an alternative to FB become successful :)

OP congrats on your launch!

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Wow there is _a lot_ of negativity in this thread. I really wanted to make some comments on this project and I hope they are constructive.

I'm wondering if you're starting off with a specific vertical in mind for this, targeting any facebook user might be a bit hard, so maybe consider curating to specific groups of people or communities. The current UI/UX would not be appealing to engineers for example (pop colours, animations, sliding panels) but to a more creative community it might be a welcome change.

Social networks are a dime a dozen, you most likely have some features that differentiate slyde from others and some features your target audience will appreciate. Let your users know about them. The landing page doesn't offer much information. Why and how is slyde better for my community, friends, or work?

Help the user understand what your features do, channels don't load, and I don't know what they are. The button to "create a post" is giving me three options for feed/channel/story. I don't know what these are and I don't know how to find out. I am not sure what an invite will do.

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Various minor personal annoyances with the site itself: The whole site is visually overloaded and is bringing my browser to its knees (on a pretty beefy desktop). The vertically scroll on the home page result in me going to the previous page when using the trackpad. Clicking on "create a post" takes 5 seconds to do something. Various buttons don't show the correct cursor making me think they are not clickable.

Again a personal peeve: I would not invite my friends/family to anything that suggests that they might know random strangers. I understand these are the first days of the network but logging in and simply seeing a list of options and reasons I should invite my friends would be more encouraging than seeing random people's faces.

Hi, I've created an account to see the platform and now I want to delete my account. How do I do that? To have to ask this question is already a sign that the platform is shady.

This does need to be easier. Up until now we've just had people e-mail deleteme@slyde.network and we take it down. This isn't displayed anywhere, as it should. We promise to have a self service tool within 48 hours to do that. We want to build something people want to use, and we most definitely don't want people feeling like they can't leave if they want. GDPR doesn't want us to want that either!

Social media hasn't changed in over a decade but the way we live our lives, especially digitally, has. We've grown up but our social media hasn't. Slyde isn't meant to be an idealogical anti-facebook. Slyde is meant to help us connect more meaningfully and privately with the people we know. Privacy doesn't have to be an idealogical decision, it can be a design decision from the beginning that could still result in a viable model.

Myself -- an ex lead architect and senior engineer at Vacasa and Nike -- and a few of my non-engineering friends got together and decided to build the next social media platform. We just made it public late last week and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback both from our closed testing (with just friends and family) and our single post about it the day we went public on Reddit. We had more people check it out and get accounts than we anticipated; it feels like we've hit the right nerve. We made something we wanted to use and we already have a lot of people who have never had social media who now have a Slyde. We hope you all on HN will like it too.

There is a video on the front page you can watch that is only 2 minutes long but explains the basics of how it works.

Cant access it. Is it a USA only site or the site is down ?

The website is available everywhere. The iOS is temporarily US only until Apple approves the region updates we just made. Android should be available world wide as well. I was able to still access it myself. Where are you accessing from, if you don't mind my asking?

To me, the ideological anti-Facebook are private group chats.

How do they plan to take on modern social media networks with their massive network effects? This is like a corner shop claiming that they will be Amazon's replacement.

It’s gonna be hard. Everyone has to start somewhere though. It looks a lot cleaner and polished than a lot of social media’s that I’ve seen pop up.

In my opinion, it's a nearly impossible feat, but possible. I think the only way to get it to work is to generate an organic base that loves it and shares it in that same ilk. It had to get started somewhere and we got there. Our first concern was, once people got on would they like it? The answer thus far was yes, our percentage of daily actives was nearly triple what we thought, given no critical mass. The next question is, getting more people on. It's been growing well enough organically the last 24hrs but this very question is really one I don't know if there's an answer to yet, and maybe we're going to answer it here.

Created an account, none of my friends there. Critical mass is vital.

The critical mass problem is the most difficult social problem to solve. Just have to make something people want to use and if they want to use it, they'll share it. That's the idea anyway.

I'm not sure any network can grow explosively without having the users submit their contacts from a previous network (email, facebook or phone, for example). And the "ethical" competitors don't want to do this, so they can't compete.

Right, but facebook isn't about great technology or user experience, it is about a common watering-hole. Claiming it is a "Facebook replacement" is premature until the adoption issue is solved.

I downloaded the app and so far I like the UI. Are there any major overhauls planned in the future?

HN hug of death?

Just signed up and it works fine for me

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