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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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brightball·

I still want to see a social platform based on email. :-)

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Try this. It's an active and thriving email-based social platform.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev

[2] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/

What are the minimum viable requirements to be a social platform? Would it be different than a social media platform? To me this would be like irc with commands then every sent message/email would reply not to everyone but return something like a html page where the user could modify text commands based on the returned message.

Maybe an app (mobile or desktop) that connects to your email account and looks for messages with a certain key, collates them and creates a news feed + comments, then as you comment and reply to things it sends platform messages to the appropriate members?

As long as you aren't looking for a platform with promoted follows vs just friends and family, it seems like a more ideal way to do so without having to worry about anyone else "owning" your network. Add encryption, etc as well if desired.

Email seemed to be the safest and most widely available means of async data exchange, with IMAP making it possible to sync between mobile and desktop easily enough.

Since I'm replying 5 days late, I assume you'll never see this, but I'm so with you. I assume it's mainly a function of designing a suitable client. e2ee, federation, open standard, rich or plain text, media-capable, etc etc.

Just post to your nearest mailing list.

Why not re-buiding the Web on SMTP as well, could be fun :p

Usenet? Mail lists? They were active and very useful 20 years ago, until spam invented.

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