Mewe.com | Hacker News Reader

Mewe.com

mewe.com

36 pointsdgs_sgd56 comments

They literally tried this [1] in 2013 after the Snowden revelations. Now they apparently bought a four-letter domain and are trying again?

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/11/sgrouple...

mewe has been around for a while.

Anecdote - when Google Plus imploded, a lot of communities in the tabletop gaming sphere moved from G+ to MeWe.

Absolutely correct, and I am one of them. AMA.

A couple things I can tell you in case you wanted to ask:

- How different is from FB? I have no idea, because I never had a FB account. But see below.

- I heard that Mewe is/was a place "dominated" by Alt-Right or Right-wingers. Not in my experience: I stick to groups that cater for my hobbies (calligraphy, drawing, Martial Arts, tabletop gaming) and the political debate is basically zero. Maybe there are specific groups for that.

- Spammers/Scammers? Each group with more than a couple hundred members tends to collect some bots. They are easy to deal with and not a big nuisance.

- I miss Google+, is this good replacement? Yes and no. The #1 feature I miss (and I suggested this as paid extra, to no avail) is that even if you mark one of your posts as "Public" it just means that it will be visible by any other MeWe member that might happen to do a search or just visit your profile. But you cannot share the link to the post outside of MeWe. (For me this is a big problem, because I often bookmarked my own posts on Google+ to refer back to them when I wanted to show something to other people). Of course my success in convincing friends and contacts to follow me on MeWe is measured in Imaginary Numbers. FB still dominates, and even if I had managed to convince lots of people to follow me on Google+, it never really become a hit for them.

- What about Censorship (NSFW, at least)? This is something I never really investigated in detail. I suppose you will not have too many problems as long as you mark your posts (or groups) as "adult only". I did not notice a lot of Adult activity around (but then again, I tend to stick to a dozen groups, and never really explore the rest of MeWe).

Anything else you want to ask, just write here.

Well, this seems to be just about everything most people wanted Facebook to be. Yet all I see here is (mostly-warranted) doubt and criticism.

Makes me wonder if an ideal service ever does come along, would we even be able to give it enough of a chance for it to stick? Or have we just been burned so badly, we'll never trust again?

It seems like all new social networks have a vicious fact to overcome: nobody's on it, so nobody uses it, so nobody's on it.

How do social networks reach that "critical mass" of users?

one way would be to be interoperable with an existing ecosystem from the start.

Michelle Lim makes a great case for this here:

https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/

Thank you for sharing the link. I like the idea of standardization among smaller social media platforms. Basically, the success of a platform built on ActivityPub becomes more tied to the success of ALL platforms built on ActivityPub.

Here's the TikTok story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/01/31/tiktok-why...

reddit founders in the early days would use fake accounts to make it seem more active

You attract more flies with honey.

I don’t see a positive message anywhere. I see that they’re against certain things, but what do they positively offer? Is the experience truly better or is it just “not THAT”.

In my experience there's two reasons to use mewe:

1)You're part of a community that imploded when G+ closed which has moved to Mewe

2)You're obsessively anti-FB and dont' care that you're posting to an empty room.

I've been on it since 2018 (reason #1) and don't really see any other positives.

I support alternatives, but I would not recommend something to my friends that I know for a fact is a subpar experience.

For that reason, I dont really recommend any alternatives right now, sadly.

Experience-wise, mewe is way ahead of facebook, especially after the disastrous "redesign". The audience, of course, is much smaller, that's a downside.

Everybody gangsta til the porn bots flood your chat

Not preventing spam was also the downfall of… oh man I can’t even remember the name right now. They built their own crypto currency social network. And added chat that uses Matrix protocol.

My friends and I are beginning to view social media in general as something that's cancerous (in the slang sense, and in terms of its' social impact) and we try to limit ourselves on it as much as possible. We struggle with getting off reddit (since it deprives smaller forums of oxygen and there are less viable alternatives than there were 10 years ago) but mostly have walked away from it.

In short -I don't recommend any either.

Moxie from Signal was completely correct that your contact list is your social network. Building off of sms numbers was smart.

Apple Messages might be the best social media for me at the moment.

I haven’t thought about the format enough to really nail it down - but some kind of facilitated contact grouping and photo sharing via iMessage would be attractive to me (as a proto-social network without all the BS).

That already exists in iMessage. They added custom user profiles, group chats are first class citizens and you can see all the photos in each chat etc

They aren't if you chat with someone who isn't on an iphone.

True! I'm thinking that something like Beeper[1] could be helpful there. They actually have an iMessage bridge even for users on Android. It's amazing haha.

[1]: https://www.beeper.com/

I did something similar as an experiment and started a Slack for people who had physically been to my home. Unfortunately the intersection with “People who use Slack daily” was small enough it has never gotten past the 5-10 user stage. But it’s fun for what Twitter used to be for me.

The only ethical alternative is an ecosystem of independent, interoperable sites which are based on a common protocol.

Free Forever, No Ads. Not sure how this will work but I'm curious to see if they can pull it off.

Their business plan is to fund the free tier with optional premium features like extra storage, live voice and video calling, etc.

So there's a US company behind it? That's not very appealing for EU citizens who care about their data. It's not a non-profit either.

They have to be a non-profit too? Isn't that an unreasonably high bar?

As long as want to make more and more money they have a strong incentive to work against their users eventually.

Is it...at least decentralized? Doesn't seem to be. The main issues here are not whether some centralized entity does good things or whether some centralized entity does bad things but rather that there is a centralized entity. This entity could shift from doing good things to doing bad things whenever they feel like it, and are free to take the entire network with them.

I'm not going to join some new service on the basis of "trust us, we swear lol." Show me a protocol, not a service.

Maybe non-predatory social media and profit-driven production just aren't compatible.

Sounds like Mastodon is for you.

https://joinmastodon.org/

> Show me a protocol

Based on the W3C recommendation, ActivityPub.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

There are other interoperable implementations noted here:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

There was a point in the development of the internet when we switched, without a lot of discussion at the time or since, from a world of collaboratively-developed, open and decentralized protocols, to a world of private silos. It's like the internet developed to the point of creating HTTP and then that one broke things from there on out — can you think of a single major communications protocol that was created after HTTP and is still in use? Seems like it's pretty hard for open distributed protocols to compete with the convenience of vertical, for-profit sites.

If we can ever sort out the problems with cryptocurrencies+smart contracts, one of them might someday provide a path to creating the right set of incentives allow splitting protocol creation, hosting, and maintenance once again. No idea if that will come to pass though.

> can you think of a single major communications protocol that was created after HTTP and is still in use?

Trivially, HTTPS.

Not to detract from your larger point, with which I tend to agree...

"The best texting and chat app with privacy you trust."

But why would anyone trust a closed source platform running on someone else's infra?

Pros: Not facebook

Cons: No users, dark mode costs $2 a month

Cons: its name is "MeWe"

Me Wii on MeWe? We See.

If not Me Wii on MeWe, we see SheWee, maybe

I like MeWe. Not as chummy as Twitter, yet the interface is far more coherent than that of Facebook.

Why no website? I'm not gonna install app just to use social network.

I've never used MeWe's mobile apps, I've always used the desktop site.

I'm not sure what you mean. I read mewe from my browser on the desktop all the time.

When I visit the page there are only 2 buttons. Install Apple app or install Android app. No login, no register, nothing.

I haven't been on a social network since Google- jumped the shark in 2015, and I don't miss it. I'm certainly not going to be associated with a platform whose name rhymes with a childhood euphemism for piss (weewee).

This looks like it was made by nsa/fsb. The stock-photo, hashtag heavy design really smells like a honeypot.

It has happened before:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...

I've heard that some of the "free speech" "social networks" are similar ops.

In a cointelpro op the aim is to dissolve and break up movements. Parler etc seem to have had the aim of amplifying and providing cover (a way to coordinate in secret) to the violent jan 6th extremists.

I think that's a difference worth considering.

Not much reason for the NSA or FSB to create new social networks, I'm sure FB and vkontakte suite their needs just fine.

True and fb will have a wider social graph context.

Though it seems useful (for threat monitoring) to also have trimmed self-selections with only people who want to communicate privately and "speak freely".

On the other hand, did you know the CIA has a venture capital arm?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

TIL

The site looks like it was based off a template and a cheap one at that. It doesn't strike me as trust-worthy nor are the people deeply invested in making something that will last and be worth investing my time and social network into.

facebook or mewe?

I have JS disabled by default. The page appears blank, I bounce off.

Please have at least some text on your site, an about link or whatever. Something.

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