1. You use your existing email.
2. You create a desktop app that reads your email, and if the email is "social" you import it into your locally stored feed.
3. For those who want it online everywhere, some end-to-end encrypted web thing to act as the desktop client.
Voila, you have a way to keep in contact with friends, and keep photos / timelines of everyone.
Check it out. It's still there. You might like it.
https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Main_Page
Free accounts on free server: https://www.eternal-september.org/
Works great in Thunderbird, pretty much as you describe.
Hands up who has heard of usenet? Would know where to start!
Ok.
My idea could also work with any message system. Turn your whatsapp and email and sms and so on into your “feed”.
See stuff in a “feed” that is quality enough that people are proud enough to send to you as a person rather than shitpost on a social network.
Keep that stuff out of the data broker network.
Just because you haven't heard of it does not mean it's obscure... or doesn't exist or isn't still alive and well.
2. No typical user will use a desktop app to browse a social network unless some features are impossible to implement in a webapp (e.g. Discord's screen sharing with sound)
3. That requires users to trust that your app is really end-to-end encrypted. They're not gonna until you get massively successful. Your servers would also need to tunnel a ton of data. For example, I'm pretty sure webapps can't make IMAP requests directly from the user's browser. You'd have to bundle a WASM TLS library in the client and run an open WebSocket proxy on your server to forward requests to any IP that might be an email server. Of course those IPs are often shared with other services. Thanks to end-to-end encryption and Encrypted Client Hello, you'll never know what fraction of your bandwidth is really being used to retrieve email.
Oh and my gut feeling says most of your users will be the sort of people that new users will not want to hang out with.
Not that long ago there were a ton of email startups doing exactly that, usually focused on Gmail.
Look, you’re not the first guy to come up with an idea like this. We’ve all thought about it and shot it down 5 minutes later because building anything useful on top of email is really really hard. I brought up at least one serious technical problem that makes the E2E encrypted webapp you described very tricky. Why not just use email for optional contact discovery like every other app instead of shoving all the data through email?
Is there an email client that has or could add social features? Do we need someone to create one?