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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Really resonates with my recent experiences.

I want off the software equivalent of the fast food menu - crap designed to bring in the most revenue for the least expense, user health and preferences be damned.

I've already started replacing a lot of the "as a service" software I used with self-hosted equivalents.

The next one I really want to hit is "family chat" since Apple is still making a mess of it for folks with families split between iOS and Android. I'd been looking at the self-hosted options, and none of them really hit the spot - I might just bite the bullet and make my own.

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> family chat

Please build this! I have a large family with a mix of android and ios users, ages 18 to 80. We end up using long running text message threads as an ad-hoc social network, with people posting pictures, links, updates, comments, etc., and things get disorganized because discussions are not threaded.

I would love "reddit for families" -- for lack of a better description. Threaded discussion with easy "posting" of pictures, links, and videos, with a simple interface similar to imessage or google messages, which everyone already knows how to use.

Just to play devils advocate, what if you just made a private subreddit for your family?

While I also struggle with the android/apple divide in my family I feel like getting them all to agree to use an existing social platform would be exceptionally difficult, but it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting them to use a custom or relatively unknown app for comms unless it did something really special or novel.

So at least in my case -

I have a couple of problems with outsourcing this kind of thing like that.

Namely - a private subreddit would work but comes with a LOT of downsides.

- Ads (this is pretty much a dealbreaker on it's own...)

- Signup

- Changing UI/UX

- Lack of control over uploads/content (who backs it up, when, how?)

- Lack of control over the general experience

The nice thing about custom software is that as long as the user count is low, and it's family that you trust, you can ditch a LOT of the pain points of online software.

ex: who needs signup/login when I can just embed a shared key?

I'm fully in agreement with all of your downsides (although ads aren't necessarily a dealbreaker for me).

The pain point for me is that my family/friends circle isn't willing to try and use new software especially stuff that might be custom or have some lack of features.

It took me a year or more to get my dad to send me pictures and videos over FB Messenger instead of SMS (he has an iphone and I have an android). Maybe I just need some new persuasion tactics but the idea of putting energy and time into building a custom app for my family and then dealing with pushback and a reluctance to use it just sounds exhausting to me.

> ... what if you just made a private subreddit for your family?

Yes, I have toyed with this idea, it is after all almost exactly what I'm looking for. But ultimately rejected it for the reasons @horsawlarway stated. I guess I just don't trust Reddit.

My family has been using GroupMe this way for many years.

Thank you for the recommendation! Looks interesting and I will definitely check it out.

Perhaps not quite what you're looking for, but our family recently just switched to our own Zulip instance, and we've been loving it.

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