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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I just want a Facebook like place to interact with my friends and family, that I pay something for, and has no ads, news, likes or social manipulation. But no one would invest in such a thing, and if they did, Facebook would just buy out the investors and kill it.

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Venture backed or publicly traded media companies are pretty much doomed to go bad after a while. They start out offering a useful service but once the pressure of eternal growth comes they are are forced to do shadier and shadier things. There is just no way around it. The only thing that could work is a private company like Craigslist that is OK with relatively steady profits without needing to grow. But in today’s environment it probably would be very hard to start something like Craigslist, succeed and stay independent.

publicly traded media companies are pretty much doomed to go bad after a while

This may be more true than you know. I observed this when I worked in television.

ABC News' decline started when ABC was bought by Capitol Cities.

NBC News' decline started when NBC was bought by General Electric.

CBS News' decline started when CBS was bought by Westinghouse.

The death of local radio news happened after each of the local news radio stations were bought by Jacor or some other enormous out-of-town corporation that answers to its investors, instead of the public it was meant to serve.

I don't remember when but at some point taking on VC capital became like a death-knell to me.

Was definitely before reddit did, I remember thinking that was the beginning of the end.

Makes me terrified for the housing market.

I left Facebook a few years ago, and started creating larger iMessage groups for friend groups and family. I create shared iCloud albums of photos for vacations and send the links around. It's a little more work but the interactions are now much more personal.

try halloapp.com

If someone was willing to go to the effort to create this thing, they might just be the type to reject Facebook offers.

If you're okay with self-hosting then you might checkout nextcloud.

Nextcloud's marketing is very business-focused. It does file hosting and chat rooms, which is great, but does it have anything like the Facebook feed? My elderly relatives don't want to go hunting for information. They want to log in and see a feed with "Cousin Itt posted some baby photos" or whatever.

I've looked through the apps [1] but I'm still not sure if this is something that's possible.

[1]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/categories/social

halloapp.com

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