Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?

Hey James,

Congrats on launching!

Great minds think alike. I also have a similar app (heh, also called "Circles") still in beta at https://testflight.apple.com/join/cwsJZed9

There's also now MinesTRIX from a guy Henri Carnot in France. https://minestrix.henri2h.fr/

Don't let the haters on HN get you down. (Although, hey, you're getting more traction here than I did. Go you!)

But either way, the geeks are not the audience who are going to make or break these projects. I swear half the non-technical people I talk to are very ready for something new. People on HN would be amazed at the hoops that "normies" are jumping through in order to avoid Facebook.

PS - Henri and others (including myself) are working on a spec that would allow these apps to interoperate with each other, letting users on different apps communicate with each other just like with email or Matrix chat. It would be great to have you as part of that effort.

Thanks, Charles!

We actually had a call a few months ago, September I believe. I'm also in your Circles Matrix room!

Haters are great, always good to have an opposite opinion and people feel strongly enough to write something (whether good or bad)!

Agreed on that though, shoot me an email! You should also get speaking to Jackson (https://twitter.com/otherJackson) who's working on data standards for the web as a whole.

That's so funny. I had a call with Charles 7 months ago and immediately thought of him when I saw this. Come back a day later and he's here!

Here's a skeptic's take on this:

- People share privately in group chats. For example, in Whatsapp groups.

- Circles were tried by Google, and got nowhere. One of the big lessons was that people don't want to organize friends into circles. In group chat (like in Whatsapp), one person creates/admins the group and all its members benefit. The grouping (chosen by one person, say "Tennis club") is more often than not equally relevent to all its members - sparing each member the burden of creating and maintaining circles individually.

- If you're talking about encryption, you'll need to be clearer about it

Skeptic's take is always appreciated!

- They do. There's definitely overlap there although because groups are often centred around a topic (school, work, hobby), it's generally not the place to share things that aren't directly concerning the group/people in the group. Eg. I want to a great building I've just visited, I'm generally not going to share it to the group chat for my class in my masters, but I would like certain people to see about it. Circles here are closer to a broadcast list.

- Somewhat true, I think there are many points of failure in that case study. Our hypothesis is that by making a social network function entirely through circles, people will have a much more enriching and intimate experience. This has been proven true with current users, despite it not being for everyone.

- Noted. Thanks for this.

I know its frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early, but if I am not the product, how do you plan to sustain and grow this? I believe social media inherently has only one product, social interactions. If you users are not being charged, they are the product. Do you plan to charge content creators? Do you plan to charge for premium features? I ask because otherwise it might just go the way of Google+ and disappear in a few years.

One idea might be to go the Pateron way but with a free tier. But then its something akin to youtube/tiktok not really a social network.

I came to ask the same question. I like the concept but if its going to disappear after 12 months its not worth the effort.

Same for me. I think it would be wise to think about monetization of these sort of apps before even writing code, and be up front about it towards potential customers (not users).

Thanks for the comment. Having an FAQ would have been a nice way to cover this as it seems you're not the only one!

We plan to monetise through paid premium features, none of which have been included in the first public version of the product. So previously didn't think it was relevant to talk monetisation!

I swear I am not trying to be a jerk, but I have heard this way too many times but have never seen this succeed in a way which adds to the service. Most of the times the paid premium feature is "no ads" or less wait times etc. Especially for a social networks, I can't even imagine what feature you can build which will make me pay you to be in touch with my friends.

One point against my argument might be reddit gold kind of stuff. They are more of a status signal. You can monetize status signals.

That's a solid point and hence why we've been reluctant to set out a future monetisation strategy. However...

In terms of monetising utility, Beeper/Texts.com seem to be getting a lot of attention, where they charge 10$ a month for their interoperable chat service. People seem to be happy to pay to have a centralised client for all their chats.

Otherwise as you've mentioned you have status signals, which is the case for Twitter Blue too. There's also the dating apps.

> frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early,

it is?

Would you pay for a subscription to a social network without ads? Doesn't seem too far from an actuality

This depends directly on whether my friends will pay to be on that network. Game servers are a great example. I will pay if my friends are also on the same server.

The problem is, there are way too many free options for us to organize. And this doesn't bring anything to the table which is spectacular.

Great points.

What would you consider spectacular? Social network app that delivers crack cocaine by a drone? The grail of immortality?

I think you're on to something

Great question. I feel like we have two kinds of social networks right now parasocial (tiktok/instagram/etc.) and social (facebook/reddit/etc.). And there is a huge lack of good second ones. A spectacular social network for me would focus on social relationships and do something to facilitate making new ones online.

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

Nothing comes close. I feel like there is a lot of emphasis on content discovery but none on people discovery. The biggest problem I have right now is its hard to find like minded people. Maybe subreddits come close but they are not as social as I want them to be. Like I don't really know these people. Our bond seldom goes beyond our shared interest in the subreddit topic. But in real life people meet over a shared topic but it expands into a more fulfilling relationship.

After writing all this out I feel like what I want is ok cupid but for finding friends. The problem with that seems to be every time someone tries to do that they have one leg in the dating world (and I understand why, its lucrative). For once can someone actually put people discovery at the center of their product?

That's really interesting - do you use anything like Meetup.com or are you on any discord/slack servers?

There is a cool app that I've been using called Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/), it links you with another person one time a week. Might be worth trying if you haven't already. Otherwise I'd really been keen to chat on how we could solve that problem!

Completely true about the people discovery apps (probably why most of them end up as dating or a hybrid dating/networking), so in my experience it seems that the only thing that overcomes this is strong interest based products focused on groups.

I do use meetup and weeples but they are ... not online native. I would love to chat more about this if you can provide a channel.

That's a great point. Our baseline assumption has been that, by and large, people would not pay for a social networking function on its own. So in that we've been hesitant to talk about monetisation with future features.

Great work on the app! I haven't used it yet, as I'm reluctant to download an app or even sign up for an app without a clear demo of how it works. The video on the landing page explains the principles of the app (circles, privacy, etc) but it doesn't show how it works in practice.

As someone who also abhors social media, how is this different from those experiences? How are the circles managed? How are my posts and feed managed?

I used Google+ back in the day, and the circles concept was introduced with that. The circles were somewhat tedious to maintain, and became difficult at scale. How is this easier or better than that?

Also, without a web option, it's a no go for me for a social media app.

Thanks for all these comments, all noted. You're right, a demo would be nice and also super simple to do.

Also a great point, as mentioned in the OP, I've been off social media for some time because I hated them. So bar the standard stuff of onboarding, posting a piece of content etc. We've pushed to do the exact opposite of a normal social media app. Some examples:

- You must add someone to a Circle to see them in your feed, and share to them. - Reactions and comments are only shown between mutual contacts. So if you're viewing a post - Names and Posts are encrypted at rest, and we don't ask/take any data we don't need. We want to push this further in time but our intent is that we actively eschew collecting specific data about individuals, so don't have incentive to make the app driven by ads/addictive features.

Google+ was interesting but ultimately was just Facebook with more friction (eg. connect with as many things and people as possible). We're using the Circles concept to target the inner parts of your network, rather than everyone. Still a WIP, though!

Also good feedback, we focused on mobile because of limited resource but a web option would be great. Is there a specific reason it's a no go for social apps?

Honestly if you have limited resources wouldn't a web app/PWA be a better option to give you faster turnaround on bug fixes and features, and a wider platform reach?

Personally I'm quite conservative about installing apps due to concerns about security, battery usage etc - the only social media apps I have on my phone are WhatsApp for family stuff and Twitter for casual scrolling. I'm happy to just jump into a web app and try it out though.

Yes, in hindsight this is in my mind! First time founder and Circles was the first piece product/code that I wrote on my own accord, evolved quite a lot but still some decisions I would make again.

Web-app seems to be the consensus here so will definitely keep that in mind. Thanks for the feedback!

I avoid downloading apps in general, but in particular social media apps because they make use of many dark UX patterns (notifications, location/data access requests, etc). I'd rather avoid altogether. So I browse reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, etc from mobile web when I do use them. Your app may promise not to have or add those patterns, but I still won't use it if I don't have it as a fallback. I also spend a great deal of time on my laptop and need the option to use a desktop app or website in order to interact with a social media service.

All noted. Thanks!

Great work on the app! I haven't used it yet

These two statements don't go with one another.

Syncing contacts from my phone is a hard no even from established companies -- there's just way too much potential for abuse. An unknown individual wanting this screams scam.

But let's assume for the moment that you aren't running a contact harvesting scam... I hardly use Facebook and I'm very particular about who I add on there. I actually go back and remove people I don't interact with or who create noise --I want to be able to log in once a week and see what people are doing, not scroll through memes or other crappy shared content.

My contact list on my phone, on the other hand, has friends, ex-friends, family, current and former coworkers, etc. Most of them I don't want to be connected with on a social network.

So I guess what I'm saying is that from my perspective, you aren't solving any problems, and are just a potential security risk when it comes to sucking up contact information.

I’m sure all the people in your contact list who don’t want their information shared would be happy that you say no. Frankly, I’m always somewhat amazed that people do share that information. To me, it doesn’t feel like that’s mine to share.

Appreciate the comment! We do this to see if there is an existing user for a connection (like any chat app). We don't store the contact book on a server nor process anything other than that.

I can understand the hesitation, it's something we'll consider changing back or making opt-in.

Thanks for the grace there, and that's a problem we are solving. You might have X contacts on Circles but you're only going to see from those you have placed in a circle. So only content from people you actually want to see from.

In terms of syncing contacts, we don't store any contact book information on our servers. We pass through the contact book to see if a user exists there, we return them back as a connection. If not we return them as someone you can invite.

> In terms of syncing contacts, we don't store any contact book information on our servers.

But... Again, you expect me to trust you. And if I don't trust Facebook or other well-known contacts to use my contacts appropriately, why would I trust what appears to be two random individuals in the UK to not retain that information? Are we supposed to forget the lessons of the past with all of the apps that have used our data inappropriately?

We pass through the contact book to see if a user exists there, we return them back as a connection. If not we return them as someone you can invite.

Do you log who someone has looked up in Circles when they join? If you do then you could trivially reconstruct someone's contact book.

That's what Facebook were found to be doing, except they were actually creating 'shadow profiles' for the contacts.

We don't actively log or analyse that information, no.

Not to rain on your specific parade but I think enough "sharing" options have emerged (whether through regular chat, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, let alone existing social networks) that I'm not sure what this is trying to solve. Looking at your first five features on the landing page:

I already have a set of grouped contacts across different apps ( Circles, Private Interactions) all with encryption (Encrypted Posts) and it's trivial to switch across apps to share anything, especially via the phone, which stores any media I'm sharing ( The Vault).

The friction from downloading a specific app then also getting all of my different contacts on that app so I can replicate functionality that already exists makes this seem like a non-starter for me.

Is there some additional functionality or hook I'm missing? Not trying to be snarky, asking genuinely.

Just go try it out?

How to try a social-sharing-network thing without the social-network?

All that does is share content with nobody. To what? Practice pressing the share button in yet-another app? (I'm sure the workflow is common as the others)

Let's agree that spending 3 minutes typing an essay asking "what does it do" could be better spent actually evaluating the product and reporting back with info for the rest of us

Appreciate this! We really welcome the feedback & are happy to hear it, positive or negative.

I disagree here. I strongly believe there's a market for a better social media app, that messaging apps are not hitting. Why? messaging apps (chat, discord, WhatsApp, Signal) are not really social media - they're organized differently with communication at the center and content sharing on the edge (as opposed to Facebook, with content sharing at the center and communication on the edge).

That edge v. center distinction dictates the use patterns, and social media is therefore used differently than a chat app. With a chat app, the social media aspect is drowned out by the sheer volume of communication, largely text based and not media based.

But why is there a market? There is a growing movement to get away from Meta-based social media apps, because they're incredibly addictive and rob users of their attention / time. That being said, I still want to see what my friends are doing... but I'm sick of needing to choose between getting life updates from friends or having my brain back.

Build me a platform that isn't Meta-based and isn't addictive and lets me share fun things with my friends and I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for it.

Telegram is very much about content sharing. News, hobby groups, paid adult content, crypto scams, memes - it has it all. Although primarily in Russian.

Appreciate this, thanks! The points you've made here hit the nail on the head for taking the choices we have.

Would love to chat about your current social usage and what you would expect from us in a way that you'd be happy to pay for. Can get me via email at james@oncircles.com if you'd be up for chatting!

That's fair enough! We're definitely not trying to build for everyone and it's good you have solutions set for yourself. Our proposition is simply to have a place to share/broadcast to the different sets of people in your life, away from social media.

In that, chat apps are great but are not designed for sharing individual updates, without running several different conversations & dealing with notifications.

Appreciate the feedback though & hopefully we'll develop into something that can gets you excited.

- your landing page says 'On Circles, your data is encrypted at rest. This means no ads or questionable business.', how does data being encrypted relate to 'no ads'?

- asking for contacts while saying nothing about how you monetize is a huge red flag to me

- since you are already using cross platform JS framework, how about making it available as a PWA? or maybe provide apk directly? google store doesn't cover a sizeable number of android devices

- your landing page still says 2021 in its footer

> how does data being encrypted relate to 'no ads'

I guess they are talking about data-mining your at-rest data for personalised ads.

- Ads on any sort of app are generally targeted. Meaning they use personal information, including browsing history, to serve you specific ads that you are more likely to click on. By encrypting data at rest and, asking for little personal information, we purposely make it more difficult for us as a company to serve targeted ads. Ideally it would be impossible and this is what we aim for in the short term.

- Fair point. Noted.

- Both points here would be a relatively easy step, so will figure something out. Thanks!

- Noted. Thanks!

I think you need to clarify what you mean by at rest. You mention browser history but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's encrypted in the browser. If you mean it's encrypted within your data store on your servers, that's great for security but doesn't really address the ad concern. I'm assuming you hold the encryption keys. If that's the case, you can decrypt the users' data in your data store for ad targeting purposes.

In terms of the ad concern, through our choices we have already made that inconvenient to do. At the moment we do hold the encryption keys, but as privacy seems to be a great concern (as we expected it to be) we will continue to push forward our practices on privacy.

So to be clear, anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS, then encrypted at rest on our servers, to which we currently (but hopefully not for long) hold the keys.

How exactly is post encryption implemented? How do viewers decrypt the content (key management)? Where is it decrypted? In the browser? Server-side?

In the end for me the question is: How can I trust you to not leak my private posts? Why should I not continue using Signal groups? I realize that I’m probably not your main target group.

Have covered this question in a few replies but in short: anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS and encrypted at rest on the server. We hold the keys, at least for now until we implement a better solution. Posts are decrypted server-side and are encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS.

You can trust us because we say we are going to respect your privacy and we need to build trust and do what we say we will in order to build a great brand. I understand this often isn't enough and trust has been abused by other companies, and for that we'll keep pushing on the privacy front of the product.

Any plans on fediverse integration? It would be great if it could communicate with mastodon instances - and would fall in line with your privacy goals, but I'm not sure how feasible that would be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

A new unknown app claiming its privacy friendly asking me for all my contacts with out being open-source and not even properly tested? No thanks.

Appreciate the comment. As mentioned in some comments we will continue to push the privacy front as far as possible, until then we've tried to be clear about communicating where we are with that (and clear about what we're not yet doing privacy wise).

1. The vast majority of our privacy is in product experience. Sharing with less people instead of everyone, making reactions and comments only visible between mutual contacts. 2. Names, Posts, comments and replies are encrypted at rest. 3. We sync your phonebook for contact discovery and don't store it on our servers. Therefore it is not linked to your identity. This is a hard problem to solve as Signal wrote in this blog post (https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/)

That said, privacy is a super important issue and external testing and open-sourcing is something that we desire to do. So thanks for the checker here!

Just chiming in that until it’s fully open-sourced (or at the very least source-available with a license allowing me to build, modify, and run it myself), this is entirely uninteresting as an alternative.

We are many that had trust broken one too many times.

IMO encryption/privacy means nothing if I can’t ensure it’s what it says myself. Ability to self-build is the only way to make that happen.

Definitely get where you're coming from here - have noted.

Thanks for sharing! I think the idea is great (Usually new social media networks have some good underlying idea) but how are you going to overcome the massive hurdle of getting people to join a new social media network?

Many people says they "hate" social media, in reality everyone is still using it and it's very hard to even convince people (even close family) to use another messenger even though the barrier is way lower than a social network.

that’s a key question. OP mentioned Path (which was an incredible product), but probably they struggled with the acquisition. One of the super powers in a social network is the network effect and OP need to understand how to overcome that.

Thanks for the comment! I think it's a great question, the hypothesis with Circles is that a vast amount of people would like to share online but don't because of the dynamics of these other social apps make them uncomfortable.

So in that the hurdle has been overcome because people are able to share content and interact in ways that they 'can't' do elsewhere. There's also a group of people (like myself) who avoid typical social media, so downloading a different solution is less of a hurdle because it's designed for them.

However, you point about people 'hating' social media yet still using it is well and true. It's almost like fruit vs mcdonalds, everyone would prefer to be an avid fruit eater and have control of their diet, but few do in the end. In that we believe the only moat for social networks is providing utility that other networks can't - YC wrote a really good blog post on this in relation to WeChat (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3t-how-wechat-grew-to-be...). We're obviously not there yet but it's a start.

Also, if looking for a solution to that messaging problem, Beeper and Texts.com are creating something exciting there. Perhaps the social media equivalent of these services will be enabled by interoperability by DeSo, ETH or the like. Interesting to think about.

IMO the way to succeed as a new social network is to use the Slack approach. Make your tool useful to small organizations and communities, and then connect instances later. Slack is useful to my team even if no one else uses it, but it's nice to be able to invite anyone who uses slack into our channels.

Congrats! It's impressive to go from learning to code, to shipping a product with this level of polish, in less than two years.

I tried to build essentially the same thing on top of Matrix (and got rejected from YC in the process) - I haven't tried the app yet but I have some initial thoughts and questions. I really hope you succeed with this; forgive me if I come across as a skeptic.

#1 question: every notable social app had some clever strategy and/or shenanigans to attract a critical mass. What's your plan to tackle the network effect problem? Maybe 10% of the value of a social app is the UX, the other 90% is that the people I care about are there.

Are posts end-to-end encrypted, or encrypted at rest? Your video says E2EE but your landing page says encrypted at rest. There's no wiggle room for confused messaging on this. Your blog says you're using Matrix but one of your comments here suggests you abandoned that idea? If so, I'm curious to hear why. Are/were you sharing content directly in Matrix rooms, or storing encrypted content in an object store and using Matrix as a key sharing mechanism, or something else? Can you say more about the problems you encountered?

The landing page design is slick, but there's too much motion pulling my attention all over the place, and too many red flags. The animation for "Automatic Contacts" evokes a feeling that you're going to swallow up my address book and send unsolicited requests to my friends as soon as I sign up. The alarm bell with red dot is an anti-pattern. It feels weird to see all the other social networks I can integrate into my profile, considering this is squarely aimed at people who have rejected those other apps.

Your video says there are no ads, there never will be, and users are not the product. How, then, are you going to thrive in such an intensely competitive space?

Thanks, it's been a journey and appreciate the kind words!

Matrix is great, as I mentioned in one the replies, we were also building with the Ruby SDK and decided against in the end. Will update the site to reflect this & your comments.

#1 Very true, the value is determined by the users and the content they bring to the app. Because you broadcast to a specific audience, we've designed Circles to be a place for sharing things that you don't share on chat or social media. So far this has encouraged people to invite their closest contacts to the app. We also have ideas for discovery and single player features that we're building. Since you applied to YC with your version, what were your ideas around solving the cold start?

#2 Apologies for the mixed messages there! We finished the video whilst we were building on Matrix (E2EE) but our current stack has encryption at rest on our servers and anything you share in Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS.

#3 Great points and I hadn't heard this feedback before - think that you have a point.

#4 We are currently Angel funded but plan to continue to build Circles as a utility fuelled social network (as opposed to media), in this we will charge for premium features.

I tried to sign up on Android and it didn't work. It texted me a confirmation code, but putting it in the text box did nothing except make it flash and disappear. If I click "Confirm Code", a model appears with just the text "0".

Update:

On maybe the fifth try, it worked. But now it's requiring my contact list to proceed. The app itself on the home screen is just called "rn-fetch-blob" (i.e. a default react native project). I'm not going to give contact list access to an app that didn't even bother to give itself a non-default name/icon on the home screen. I think the app needs a little more time in the oven before you have other people try it out.

Cool. Appreciate this. We build cross platform to give people choice but most dev time has been spent on iOS so its further ahead. Agree that the Android needs baked longer. Will fix!

Had the same problems on iOS.

Same here. And I wouldn't share my contacts regardless. That's a big ask before getting to any main features and not worth the risk to me.

So a couple of thoughts: 1) Allow me to sign in and post texts without permissions or sharing contacts. 2) Give the option to ask me for photo/file access permissions when I push the photo upload button. 3) When adding contacts, a prompt for contact permission is okay then but should be optional i.e. I should be able to put a phone number or email address in manually. I don't know if you had that or not I stopped at the file permission.

Small grammatical error on your home page: "Less connections, more connection." - should be "fewer" not "less".

Thanks!

Fixed and will be live once site refreshes.

I was wondering why that wasn't reading right to me...

I'm a big fan of people trying to make new social networks, but personally I'm not interested in any new system not built on open protocols. Otherwise incentives are such that it's just going to turn into Facebook eventually.

I'm also very interested in open protocols, like Matrix and DeSo. However I disagree that everything has to turn into a media behemoth like Facebook. You make what you measure.

And one way or another you're going to end up measuring money eventually. Unless you are exceptionally altruistic, the only way to avoid selling out is to align incentives from the beginning. In practice this means forcing yourself to compete directly with alternative implementations, by building on open protocols. I'm not going to trust my time to your altruism.

Google+ had circles as well. I found it very hard to properly segment people properly. There are rarely such hard boundaries on relationships. If I'm snowboarding or barbecuing, it's very seldom I only wanna share that with just friends, just family, or just co-workers. It will usually be much more interest-based.

Trying to create interested-based circles was also hard, as the cardinality explodes quite fast (and you're back to square one with not knowing who you share what with).

I guess this is where Snapchat is onto something with giving a very rapid selection of who you want to share with. I usually have a small group of people in mind when I want to share something.

Defining that group, fast, almost on a per share level is the key challenge.

I think the "circles"-approach could be a way, but I think it must be much more dynamic and alive than how Google+ solved it. It must continuously evolve.

> Google+ had circles as well. I found it very hard to properly segment people properly. There are rarely such hard boundaries on relationships. If I'm snowboarding or barbecuing, it's very seldom I only wanna share that with just friends, just family, or just co-workers. It will usually be much more interest-based.

Couldn't you make circles of circles in google plus? I remember something like that, I had circles and then grouped them based on interest.

Thanks, I get what you're saying here. Often times I find myself adding people to two circles or more. Although there is the option to create new circles I generally recommend keeping close to the existing circles that are created with each account.

On that point we also offer a quick/simple mechanism for sharing to specific contacts. So you're able to share to circles and/or specific contacts.

If you try the app, I would be keen to hear your feedback. Shoot me an email if that is the case.

This is the only social media app that peaked my interest in the past few years and I will definitely give it a go.

As others have asked, can you tell us more about your pricing strategy? I would rather that you start charging right away, so I know that a) this has a chance of surviving for a longer period of time and b) you won't fall back ot ads or the VC teat :-) Also, as you said, since it doesn't depend on dozens of my friends using it, I think it would be easier to convince a couple of my friends to start using and paying for it.

Another question is: I'm guessing your biggest competitor are WhatsApp/Signal/etc. group chats. Why is it better to use Circle instead of group chats (which are also often organized as circles of friends)?

Thanks - that's awesome to hear! We're still early days and would love your feedback. Feel free to send me an email (james@oncircles.com).

It would have been a great idea to add a small price in the app store, as my core assumption was that people would not pay for a social networking app alone. Maybe I will change my assumption there. You don't need to answer this if uncomfortable doing so (or can send by email) but how much would you pay today to know the app is sustained ad-free?

Otherwise, we are fortunate to be funded by a single angel who gives us freedom to decide the path of the company. He invested with the recognition that the tides on privacy and social media are changing and that a more intimate, private social network would be a definite solution in the future (In his words, "the two most important parts of anyone's network are the closest circles and the fringes, so Circles focuses on the former").

Our next stop was to build a Circles designed interoperable chat that would allow you to send and receive messages to pretty much any major third party app. We would charge for this. However, right now we collect no individual data from our users and most user information is encrypted at rest, making it very hard for us to build any real ads mechanism.

In relation to group chats, there is a notable difference in how Circles are set up. In a group chat everything is shared to the group, and all the members are directly connected to each other because they are in that group. Circles in their current setup are closer to broadcast lists.

Hi, one of the co-founders of StoryArk (https://storyark.eu) here.

I really like your idea. We're building something similar with a focus on photo sharing.

Have you considered making the contact book upload an opt-in? We also thought about connecting our users via their phone book, but we chose a different approach as we're concerned about privacy.

If you make the contact book upload opt-in, you at least give the user the chance to try out the app before giving away the contact details of their whole phone book (without their permission).

Hey! Love the landing page for StoryArk & thanks for the ideas!

Super similar concept. A few apps I've seen pop up in the space are Lalo (https://www.lalo.app/) and Waldo (https://waldophotos.com/).

Yes, we initially had it this way and it seems from this HN launch that's what users prefer! The feature is flagged so we can bring it back and will likely do so (having an opt-in as you've mentioned).

Would be great to connect and share learnings. If you'd like send me an email (james@oncircles.com).

I also made an social network but I went other way around:

1) everything (except direct messages and internal realtime chat between our users) is visible and public

2) users are encouraged to use pseudonyms

I also don't want to make product out of users, but currently there is no monetization scheme at all. It's currently semi-open beta for invited individuals (AKA you need to ask me for invite code).

I started it when austrian social network Soup.io closed it doors. See https://kyselo.eu/ if anyone interested.

It'd be great if I could use these "circles" to limit who I create posts for on Facebook. Does Facebook allow that kind of API interaction? On their site they have a, "Pick Specific Friends" when you create a post, and being able to use circles to navigate that would be fun (saved groups?).

Maybe you can solve that "network effects" problem by integrating somehow like that? I dunno.

Congrats on launching, though! Always so hard to get something off the ground and ready for users, good work!

Great idea, annoyingly they don't have this type of API interaction! If so, would build a great client app that allows people to take the best parts of Facebook without the many negatives.

Thanks!

I'd love to learn how you are handling media/photo storage from both a technical and practical perspective. Some questions that come to mind: are you using a dedicated service or did you build it yourself? Are you using a CDN? How do you plan to deal with abusive content and the liability that comes with storing photos?

I am also working on an app where hosting photos would be a nice feature - but the risk/undertaking without proper and potentially expensive infrastructure is daunting.

Hey cool!

Media is encoded in base 64, encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS then encrypted at rest on our hosted servers. We're not using a CDN just a simple relational DB (but imagine at some point we will need to change that). For abusive content and data liabilities we currently comply with the abusive content standards set in place by the app store(s) and GDPR/equivalents.

Great work! Congratulations on launching. Here's feedback.

I don't want to sync all my phone contacts because many are confidential; do you provide a workaround?

I loved the circles concept on Google+, but many people said circles were too much overhead to create and maintain; how will your app be better?

Your landing page and video emphasize one person's personal connections, whereas Instagram and similar social networks are seeing major usage in B2C accounts; what can you say about your ideas for this kind of usage?

Thanks! Love the feedback.

Good point and something we haven't experienced before. There definitely needs to be a workaround. We had manual search and add in a previous version so

The answer here is UX. Google+ UX was clunky at best, where their circles feature was essentially just an add on to the Facebook experience (which facebook then replicated through lists). On Circles, the whole app runs through Circles and we've focused the app entirely on the benefit of adding people to Circles and creating more intimate connections with people.

Great point. I think for influencer, B2C type accounts, for now people should definitely continue to use Instagram as its not something we're entertaining for now. However, the way WeChat (I lived in China for a while) splits personal and business connection is fantastic and something I think about a lot.

In time we'd love to explore the route of a hybrid interoperable chat (beeper.com and texts.com) and social app, where B2C accounts are relegated to a more minor part of the experience (90% real life connection, 10% other). This works amazingly in WeChat because the little communication they have incentivises B2C accounts to communicate with signal and also makes WeChat monetise beyond advertisements.

Congrats on the launch!

How do you prevent this from turning into another FB? Is there a difference between using this and using FB where you have all of your posts / activity only viewable with your friends? I guess one obvious difference is FB's advertising and data mining. Are there any features that you absolutely will not add to Circles in the future because they will 'cross the line' into turning Circles into a FB clone?

Thanks!

It's a very valid question, the answer is that I don't think the market wants another FB (especially after today). In that, and from continually trying to scratch my own itch, we need to build something that works in an entirely different way.

If you try the app, we've turned a lot of 'standard' social features on their head, like how interactions work and are viewed in the app. But to answer your question:

- We will not ask for any personal information (such as job, school, interests etc). - We will not add noise on the feed, such as what other people are liking/commenting on. - We will not have any third party content on the feed. Eg anything that isn't from your contacts you have circled. - We currently (and will continue) to only show you posts from contacts you have actively circled. - We currently (and will continue to) keep the feed in chronological order.

Looks quite nice.

But I did use Google+ and it was just no one else really using those features.

So nope I'm not seeing the benefit of syncing my contacts with your service.

WhatsApp won in our family for sharing.

Thanks!

That's true, same with Facebook links and in some ways, close friends on Instagram. Our argument here is that rather than having it is as one-of-many features, we're focused on making a joyful experience around this single feature, creating a different space for sharing.

Feedback noted though!

Arguably I shouldn't even answer since I have no interest in a social app and would not try this no matter what it was, but there are some more specific issues related to the use of phone contacts.

Understand that, to anyone who owns a home or is registered to vote, a phone is effectively useless. Very nearly every call I ever receive is a refi offer or vote canvassing or someone who wants to buy my house. The purpose of a contacts list is a way to allow me to know I'm receiving a call from a source I actually want, or need, to answer. But mostly this means businesses. The numbers are associated with an office, not a person.

And, as another commenter noted, the numbers that are associated with persons are effectively anyone I ever had a relationship with and never deleted the number. That includes women I went on one date with 20 years ago, people who are now dead, neighbors who haven't been neighbors in decades. I don't have their consent to share that information with you.

I understand it's a way to bootstrap a social graph without being able to export a friend's list from some other social app, but I would urge you to reconsider. For all of the other reasons I will never again use Facebook, at least one thing I think they got right was just showing you the friends list of existing friends who had opted into sharing that information with you. That was probably the best use I ever got out of it, since it allowed you to discover people you used to know and might want to reconnect with, but had never gotten or lost their contact info. It's much slower to require users to add friends one by one, but at least this requires a rough form of symmetrical consent.

Phone numbers are not private. I have never changed mine. Effectively, everyone I have ever called and told my name to may have me as a contact, and any one of them could have listed the number somewhere else. That is obviously how I get on all of these constant contact or whatever they are call sheets. Someone scraped it from public property records and now I'm a contact for thousands of people I don't know. I would not ever want to allow those people to auto-add me to a social graph. It's just inviting yet another avenue for spam. Even if you don't directly inject ads into your service, there is nothing stopping your users from doing it. You're inviting companies like LuLaRoe to leech off of you if you ever grow successful enough.

Hey, thanks for the considered comment! Appreciate the thoughts here, and all are noted. We'll answer a lot of these concerns with next steps.

Congrats on successfully switching to a new field, and the success of your first product. Both are difficult feats to pull off.

I'd be interested in some comparisons between Signal Group Chats and this app. I understand they're not a 1:1 but could be opportunity for useful contrast. Particularly for privacy concerns, e.g. how Signal is unable to assist LEOs. Not that I'm up to no good, but it is interesting.

Thanks! It's been a journey.

Signal has definitely been a source of practice here. How would you imagine we do this comparison, on the landing page?

If I'm understanding this correctly, it's possible for someone to try to share something with me, but I will not see it because I don't have them tagged? It seems the bidirectional graph means very little will end up getting shared. And if there is little content, why would it need to be behind a walled garden?

And also, how does this solve the problem of people being fake and posing on social media?

Yes. Well that's true if there is little content shared and you are considering it from the perspective of your whole friends list. Generally people are selecting who they want to share to, and sharing things they otherwise wouldn't because there is a heightened level of comfort with their audience. Would love you to give it a try and tell me the same thing after a few friends are on there!

If you mean it stops people using social media, it doesn't. But if you're talking about how people thus far have shared content on the app, they share much more authentically because they are sharing to a small group of people who they have personally selected. It's also outside of the spaces where they normally post more pristine things, which helps.

Sign up on iOS isn’t working for me. I put in the code, it looks like its going to work then it just asks me for the code again.

Also, I found a big even before that. When you start typing your phone number, the process will lock up if you stop halfway through in order to try to update your country flag to the right one. I had to back out and start again.

Looking forward to trying it!

Hey, thanks for trying us out. And sorry about the bug(s)!

Let me get some solutions and will push an update to the app store (also for Android).

I guess it follows what I was thinking to do if I ever made my social app, it's also a way of socializing that is especially useful for people who often socialize via 'projects', so work or other things that they are doing, and the people they are doing stuff with are their friends, separated on a project basis generally.

Thanks for the comment! Found that years of studying and working in Architecture and Design that I shared my work online maybe 2 times so it was that thinking that formed a lot of the architecture. If you share different things with different people, why not have the same mechanism online?

I guess the question we're trying to answer now is whether we narrow in on creating a more intimate social network for regular use or create a type of social-email hybrid for this exact use case.

The screenshots actually have the 2 things I thought about before:

- circles from Google

- combined pictures ( haven't seen this one and is a must!)

I'm downloading.

Edit 1: Required contacts ( Ugh). But - Say hello to @God ( God, i really hope i can change the handle later on) = No forbidden username list probably.

Edit 2: Ugh. Invite only lol. Disallowed contacts & storage again.

Hey there - Thanks for this & nice handle (you can change it later)!

The app is invite only but I've posted an invite code in the OP (FULLCIRCLE), also will remove the invite proxy in the onboarding in the next update. Hopefully you'll still try!

My close circle has settled on HalloApp, because we mostly want to share pictures of our adventures, kids and dogs. We don't really need/want to "chat" (I fully realize lots of people do). That said, we're all a bit of tired of trying out new social apps.

That's cool, I've never heard of HalloApp but just downloaded! Bar the chat function, how are you finding it?

Does this app integrate with existing standards for social networks like ActivityPub or XMPP?

It doesn't! Which services do you use that are built with these standards?

Mastodon and Movim.

Thanks for sharing! Haven't heard of Movim before so I will check it out.

Interesting. Will have a look when I don't need to install an app to use it.

Cool. Thanks for this feedback! We started with mobile because that's the dominant force these days but depending on movement it would be great to create a web-app or desktop client.

I definitely agree that mobile is the way to start but I'm sitting in front of my computer most of the day and definitely don't want to be picking up my tiny phone to use the awkward keyboard. I'm definitely going to hold out until the web ui launches.

Noted!

For the record, I'm not going to install an desktop app either to use a web service :)

Haha, clear!

The idea is pretty cool! I think it has potential, as when I used instagram, people seemed to enjoy the “closed friends” feature, and also created separate IG accounts to follow close friends.

Thanks! It's been interesting as I used the first prototype to learn how to code. There's been breaks between then and now but that was 18 months ago - a lot of the premises for building Circles have been adopted by IG. Close Friends, Send to Groups, DM focus and easy account switching.

If Facebook and Instagram proved something it’s that you either need dancing half-naked teenagers or conspiracy theories on your network to keep the engagement.

Ha. You've made a point there. Still waiting to be disproved in US/EU... Although WeChat is a great app and it's done insanely great (however they have added some weird TikTok like features recently).

I tried to sign up on my iPhone and it didn't work.

I think this is a great idea. What are your strategies to make users to bring their friends?

Sorry about that! At which point did it stop working?

Most bug feedback I've gotten since going live has been at the verification page for your phone number. If this is the case, the solution has been to go back a page and submit your number again - happy to support here over email if you'd like!

Our strategy revolves around the intimacy of the sharing that the app has created so far. Despite being simple (and buggy it seems!), you really only need 2-3 family/close friends to make the app joyful - successful or not we've aimed set up the app so that you get that experience as soon as possible.

An (non mom-test) example here is in how it improved my close relationships. My aunt passed away from cancer a few months ago, but before that we were able to share moments on Circles that otherwise would have not made it into chat and/or the typical social apps. Beyond holding the experience dearly, the possibilities of intimate sharing outside of typical social media made her invite her friends.

We can of course bake a bunch of viral marketing features into the product (and have started doing so) but getting this single thing right is by far top of the list.

Doesn't it seem like too much of a work? Just as you were using Hacker News, most people I know use a social network, passively. That is, there are only a few people who post regularly while others just react to it.

Also I think WA / Telegram groups basically replaced what Path / Google+ / FB Lists set out to do. It's just more convenient.

Right now Instagram does all of what I would want from a "public" social network while I have whatsapp groups for close friends.

Thanks for the feedback! It depends on the context, I think for most it is too much work but we're not focused on building a tool for everyone right now (on that I wish we could be more targeted in our marketing).

True most networks are passive, and the public networks are catering for this. I would also agree that the chat apps is a great solution for close connections and often use this as their primary social network for this reason.

From experience, because chat is a linear thread, conversation focused and notification heavy, it's really not good for sharing things that don't directly concern the person/group you're talking to.

So Circles is all about creating a space for sharing your life with those who matter most, sharing things that you don't necessarily need to share but would like to away from the spotlight of social media. For example I've been sharing my travels in Portugal to my close friends and family circles (around 20 people who are mainly not interconnected). If I did this on chat I would be opening/maintaining 10+ conversations about myself! This is the problem we're solving currently.

That said, overall I agree that there's an overlap there that takes away from the value we offer to people right now. Gotta start somewhere though!

What would be the major difference be between this and the Facebook functionality where you choose who you share with?

Great question. The major difference is that you need to add people to Circles to see from and share to them, the entire UX is focused on Circles.

Often people don't use the list feature on Facebook because a core product assumption of Facebook is that everyone you add is your friend, and lists are not a priority in the Facebook experience. The Facebook sharing experience is also centred around engagement, where more numbers makes you look better. So users have the option of using lists on Facebook but there's little incentive placed there.

Lists also don't have much impact what you see. This means on Facebook the vast, vast majority of content still comes from people you don't really care about and random content accounts from businesses and influencers. So secondarily, Circles feed is simply chronological and only contains direct content from people you have added to a circle.

You're brave taking on this task. Many have failed.. or messed up as they were succeeding.

I recently stopped using Instagram because it was filling up with nonsense. Also they push features in your face that you don't really want to use. Facebook is also a sad story. But for some reason we keep returning. We're like little rats in an experiment, waiting for our next endorphin jolt.

Thanks, it's definitely a tough ask but I think the world will be better with these options (providing they succeed to such a level).

Can relate to that, it was the same for me.

Congrats! Tell us about your software stack

Super simple, I didn't know how to code 18 months ago so when we started (was just I at that point), I stared building with what I could.

The front end is built with React Native (JS) as it provides a way for us to more or less maintain two OS with one codebase. It also is somewhat simple for us to convert out code for web with react-native-web. We do use a series of community build packages (more than I would like) but that's how its went for us early stage.

The back end is built with Rails as a simple API layer, keeps it simple to make models and controllers and build lightly with the focus on the architecture. Phone verification integrated through Twilio and we use Lockbox for at-rest encryption.

Hosted serverless on AWS EB (if going back I would stick to Heroku at least until this point and beyond).

As an experiment we also were building on top of the Matrix protocol (https://matrix.org/) with their Ruby SDK, but the cons outweighed the benefits in the end. Would love to figure out a solution here, and love the idea of interoperability championed by products like beeper.com.

Overall, I think that React/React Native and Rails is a good stack for hacking MVPs and would recommend.

Aw man, sorry to hear that Matrix didn't work out for you. There's definitely a cost to building on an early-stage technology with a lot of its own complexity. (Heh, ask me how I know...)

Still, super impressed at what you've built.

Looking forward to syncing up soon!

Definitely!

The main reason was because we were building with the Ruby SDK and it didn't have bridging (future chat...) nor a direct E2EE solution included. In that, we had a bunch of business and product solutions we wanted to understand and Matrix was clouding our ability to do that.

Would still be very keen to see a consumer grade social network built on Matrix, though.

Chat soon!

Honestly I loved the idea of Google Plus and I'm glad you picked it up.

Me too! Thanks for the comment.

What would you do when you cannot find monetization path like Path did?

Well if we can't find monetisation that's a problem. I think we're beyond 2010 though, and people are much more open to paying for signal based information as shown by Substack, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, Bumble and other services.

The "Landing: " link is not working.

Strange, thanks for bumping this. It works with copy paste so I must have done something with the formatting.

Website design and intro video look nice.

Thanks! Glad you appreciate them.

Clickable links

https://oncircles.com

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oncircles

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/circles-share-more-with-less/i...