Show HN: Slyde – A new privacy-focused general social network
slyde.network
slyde.network
Why would you build an open source, federated, mastadon like product? None of these things have led to great success for social networks have they?
Is your question "Why would you make your users able to verify for themselves and make sure using your service is actually private when you sell it as a private service ?"
You do also need to keep in mind that you need to make sure the ads themselves aren't serving tracking garbage or outright malware, even if you do not offer precise behavioral targeting or even store behavioral data.
You can maybe also sell fun premium features like Discord does with Nitro.
Premium things is something Snapchat tried out for a bit with bitmoji, though to be honest I haven't looked deeply into any available data on how that worked out for them.
1) Free with ads that may be targeted to varying degrees.
2) Paid, with zero ads and zero data collection and zero targeting.
I expect you'd find that there is a significant segment of users who would be willing to pay for the service in order to not be targeted with their specific characteristics and use patterns. Brands can build trust, perhaps make that an objective to support subscription sales.
Lots of extra scrollbars. Latest Firefox on macOS 11.
Works absolutely fine on Edge though.
* default-- show me a single page posts of my friends by date
* sadness-- choose post order and timings to maximize my sadness
* filter bubble-- choose posts to maximize my outrage about alternative viewpoints
* rabbit hole-- capture maximum amount of my attention on the platform by feeding me conspiratorial and junk content
* gamblevision-- infinite scroll, maximize my time clicking upvote/like buttons, karma building, interacting with a/b tested time-wasting games, spending karma points on loot box type bullshit, etc.
* human bioweapon-- fake news injections, with an intersection between my inferred personal tastes and a slowly increasing menu of anti-scientific covid conspiracies
Then give me, the user, an analytics page where I can see my engagement, sentiment analysis, and measurements of my changing viewpoints for each theme.
If you ask, "Why would anyone ever use such a manipulative, unhealthy platform?" well...
I would like my social network to make me feel:
Happy, excited, inspired,
Otherwise a company can flip some bits and you'll be less happy and more agitated without understanding why.
Assuming everyone you want to talk to is on Slyde, right?
And then? Let's assume (for the sake of argument) you get enough users and <big corp> dangles millions, then what?
Privacy? We'll never sell/share your data? Users are just supposed to take your word for it? The page doesn't even have a link to something like T&C or Privacy Policy - just few highlighted words.
I don't think we should trust any social network that's not "open" by design and implementation.
This is not to say we haven't been actively looking at ways we can open up or become compliant with a few of the open protocols that already exist as long as it fits with the personal privacy we want for our users on top of the data privacy.
That said, it's a similar problem with DuckDuckGo: how do we know they're respecting users' privacy? DDG has it easy, since they're a search engine; absolutely nothing about their product requires storing any info about their users whatsoever, and thus (as far as anyone knows, and as far as they say) they don't. Slyde, however, is a social network, which makes the collection and storage of data much harder (if not impossible) to avoid.
Another huge help on the transparency front would be to at least ensure the source code for any apps is publicly available. Even if not necessarily under a FOSS license (though that'd be a bonus), the apps being as easy as possible to independently audit would alleviate a lot of my own concerns with these sorts of social networking apps doing scummy things like using the microphone for ad targeting.
I can't recommend or use this until there is some kind of content control, what are your plans to prevent this from becoming another voat or parler?
Any plans for scheduling posts or a bot api?
As for API's and scheduled posts, there aren't immediate plans for that until we nail down a proper OAuth implementation to roll out with the officially supported API's. Though there are 4 of us all together, I'm the only engineer of any kind working on it, with potentially some more help on the way here shortly.
Your questions are good ones. We asked ourselves very specifically how would we avoid being another parler yet at the same time not alienate one political crowd over another? Was a difficult question. The 4 of us span the political spectrum and I think that has helped keep us centered so far.
Don't get me wrong, I would really like to see a new social network take off - one focused on privacy and data ownership.
If you can get in touch with the frontend person, please recommend that they use a link (A element) or button (INPUT element) to make the control, otherwise it is not recognized as clickable by some useragents.
I'm using serenade.ai to control the page, and it won't even let me scroll down or click buttons/links
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Around a year ago a few friends and I were talking about how we disliked social media. We came to a quick realization that we kept our accounts for the same reasons we never post on them; our friends, family and co-workers were there and we had no way to express our personality. We couldn’t share some things with friends because of fear of family members or work friends seeing. We could use groups or filters but those were cumbersome so we just opted not to post at all. Turns out we weren’t alone.
I floated the idea to them that maybe we should make our own. It was clear that there was a need for something new. But how could we give people an outlet to display their personality and still maintain that privacy?
It didn’t take long for us to determine that in most cases we all have 4 different personas in our day to day life: Friends, Family, Work / School and how we are in public. This would be the base of Slyde; it was the natural way we already maintained our social lives, we just needed to bring it online. Keep it simple. Give people 4 categories they can put people they know into, and allow them to share with those categories. Google Plus was something we looked at as an example of how giving people too many options can be a bad thing.
We got great feedback across the board on those assumptions, but we still wouldn’t use something new just because we could separate our lives easier. Through all the faults of MySpace there were a couple pieces that always made us feel like we got to know someone better. Music and Style. If we could show people a little more about ourselves instead of just writing an about me, our profile would better represent us. Especially if we could adjust it based on who was looking at it.
Being the only engineer -- I have previously worked as a lead architect and senior engineer at Vacasa and Nike -- it was going to be a large task. The biggest elephant in the room was critical mass. The value of a social network is the network. Our critical mass answer wasn’t exciting, but early results may be showing it to be true: Make something people want to use.
If we made something we would want to use, others might too. Once they’re on they aren’t likely to just delete their account. If the appetite for something new is as big as we thought it was we would see small but steady growth, and on a micro level these pockets of people would reach their own critical mass and begin sharing it at a higher rate. We’re already starting to see this happen.
We knew at the beginning the best way to get to a critical mass was to target a smaller mass. We spent a good amount of time theorizing on how we can adapt our ideas to fit a smaller niche. The more we developed these ideas, the less we found ourselves wanting to use it. We didn’t personally have a need for something new in a smaller niche community. The product that we wanted was a general social network that all our connections could join that gave us our personalities and privacy for self-expression. That idea lost it’s value if it only pandered to a niche audience.
When we released it to friends and family we weren’t expecting much. We figured a few people would sign up, we would get some feedback and then iterate. Instead, we had hundreds of them sign up and share it, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback on the overall concept. This seemed to validate that there is a need out there, and that we might have even executed on that need.
Our biggest tell that we were possibly hitting a sweet spot was how many people signed back in every day. It was initially perplexing. Even with little content during our closed test and an average anywhere from 10 to 40 connections per user, nearly 40% of our users were signing in every day, with most of our users signing in every other day. After opening it up publicly a few days ago we had our answer. We might have built something people want to use. We’ve received the same positive feedback our friends and family gave us, from complete strangers. So far we’ve only had a small reddit post to test the waters. Starting with this HN post we’re ready to start telling the rest of the world about it.
We know that for true data privacy we have to give up ad retargeting and tracking. Privacy vs profit is a real discussion, however we believe we can have a viable business model without giving away data privacy. Less targeted advertising and things like premium channels are things we’ve discussed. Privacy is a core principle and guides us in every decision, however right now it’s about building something people want and worrying about business model if we’re lucky enough to get to worry about it.
We’ve possibly stumbled upon a couple of right answers, but we surely don’t have all of them. We wanted to post on HN for two reasons: to show others what we’ve done and to get feedback on our execution. Please fire away!
After signing up and clicking around a bit, here are my thoughts:
1. Button interactions need some kind of activation effect. Whether that's a sound, or the button changes color, or something, I need to know that the button has registered my click.
2. Is there a mobile app?
3. I'm a little confused by the feed. It looks like each post also has all of the person's other posts in a slideshow. Is that accurate?
2. Yes, for iOS and Android "Slyde Social" on the appropriate app stores.
3. That is exactly how it works. Instead of seeing someone's posts throughout your feed, you can browse through their feed from most recently active connection down. This feels much more natural on mobile, and getting tweaked and adjusted for desktop users.
Also, I created the #StarWars channel. =P
[Edit] To clarify, we don't moderate based on opinion. Only when we are legally required to, otherwise we let dislikes / downvotes from other members do the talking.