Meta preps new social app
liahaberman.substack.com
liahaberman.substack.com
In e.g. The Netherlands anything from your neighborhood-watch to parents-info, or anything related to school, via business-groups, your bachelors party, to the weekly scissors-collectors-club-coffee-meet . All of these organize, inform, discuss, on WhatsApp.
I definitely think there's a sort of missing tool for family, friends and community. One that's totally private. Maybe like an open source facebook groups. But hosting is a must because no one wants to run it, we just want to know its open source, vetted and we can guarantee it's private. Where Signal was for 1:1 text on Mobile, I think something else could be community first.
You are on the right track, but I would say we don't need even need to get them "off" WhatsApp, we just need to get an intolerant minority [0] who refuses to compromise.
I deleted WhatsApp from my phone and told my close friends and family "For reasons X, Y and Z, I don't want to use Facebook products anymore. If you want to reach me, I am using Matrix. I can add you to my communick account [1] and I can help you set up your client. I know that this is an inconvenience but I think we should all revise our priorities and stop putting "convenience" above all else.
Some of them did. Some of them didn't, so they call me on the phone, or send me an email. A few of them even started to use Matrix as their primary method for communication. The important thing is that my refusal to use WhatsApp made the set "people who use only WhatsApp" set a bit smaller and the "people who could transition away from WhatsApp" set a lot larger.
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
On the family front, there's a WhatsApp group and people have learned to use it for that activity, so I can't see that behaviour changing especially when 60+ year olds are in it too. It just became the defacto mode of communication somehow. Yet funnily 10 years ago, I was not a WhatsApp user. A friend of mine dragged me on there. It reminds me of 2006 when people kept asking "Are you on Facebook", like a bunch of drug addicts.
I personally want to move some of my private content and conversations off public servers and on to one I control. Off public networks and on one I know I've secured. That to me as an engineer now makes a lot of sense. But there's also a significant burden to that and I don't think anyone else can do it. Also I don't imagine anyone will setup VPN across my extended family. So there's some things to think through before trying anything.
Both my parents are getting closer to their 70's, I got both of them to use Element. Yes, they are still on WhatsApp, yes they would prefer if I used it as well and my grumpy old man always complains about the many quirks from Element's UI on iOS. But at the end of they day we still talk frequently, they still get to see their grandkids, we still have a group to share photos and videos, etc.
The important point that I want to drive home: even if they are still using some other app, my refusal to join has made them aware and able to adopt an alternative.
> I personally want to move some of my private content and conversations off public servers and on to one I control.
As long as you are using
(a) your own domain to keep control of your identity
(b) something based on open standards so that you can port different providers
(c)end-to-end encryption
does it really matter if you are running the service?
I would say the problem with this idea is that your family is often just one group chat. She has maybe 50 threads of different groups in WA, for her moving off WA would be near impossible not because all the groups she communicates with are on there. The other thing to keep in mind is, the "HN Crowd" knows the full implications of having conversations on WA, for just about everyone else they just see a really convenient app that works extremely well. After using it I concluded that it works better than the native iMessage app on your iPhone, which just speaks to how good the app is (in terms of being an app).
The argument to move people to another app is really uphill battle because it's purely ideological/data privacy/etc related. I could easily convince someone to move to Slack from Teams because Teams sucks as an app. But the issue with WhatsApp is that as an app, it's one of the most well build and best performing.
There is nothing "impossible" about leaving Whatsapp. I'm also from Brazil, I also had the "family chat group". My cousins are still my cousins after I left the group. I can still talk with them through in person, on the phone, email, SMS. The fact that some of them don't want to join Matrix is not a deal breaker, just like my refusal to be on WhatsApp should not be a deal breaker for them.
I'm assuming you're social life has suffered?
This is the problem via the lack of universal messaging standards... I am looking at you Apple..
I wonder what percentage of your friends and family dropped off?
I ran a similar experiment to you and found it really really difficult as almost 90+% didn't want to deal with the hassle of using a different application.
> 90+% didn't want to deal with the hassle of using a different application.
On the positive side, this means that 10% of your friends are willing to try a different application to keep connecting with you. This means that if we take Dunbar's number (150) as the average size of a social circle, every person that refuses to join WhatsApp leads to 15 other people getting acquainted to an alternative network. Any network that managed to capture 10% of WhatsApp userbase would be more than sustainable, and if you imagine that as soon as secondary effects kick-in, the friction will get lower and lower.
> I wonder what percentage of your friends and family dropped off?
Dropped off from casual conversation? A good part. They are still friends, though. I can pick up the phone and call them, or send them an email like people used to less than a generation ago...
If your friends/peers can not accept personal change or let it affect your relationship, then you are dealing with shitty friends to begin with.
It took persistence.
What I’ve found to work is taking it one family member at a time. And do it in person, get them to commit to using it. Then ask if you can set it up for them, show them how it works. Join them into the group chat, and then at least you’ve removed the friction to joining.
It has a much better UX than Signal, more desirable features, not to mention more users and channels. There is an on-demand E2E encryption for those who want it. Pavel Durov is not on a friendly terms with Russian govt now for those who care about it. You can pay for the service to support the company, get rid of ads and gain some meaningless features.
What's not to like?
> on-demand E2E encryption for those who want it.
E2E is only available as a one-to-one, not a group. It must also be switched on for every chat. Part of the allure of E2E is that an individual who needs it (say, a reporter) is indistinguishable from those that don’t (the general public), and those that are best blending into the crowd (like an anonymous source).
There are other failure modes here (who speaks to whom isn’t necessarily hidden, just the text), but it’s a better starting point than “on-demand e2e for those that want it”.
Just the other day i was trying to share another user with my wife and just couldn't figure it out. I think there were some hidden privacy settings for that user that i wasn't aware of.
I want the com util app to be contacts only and groups invite only.
Most of the (sane) parents that I know hate those WhatsApp groups with a passion, but they unfortunately have to be there "because there's where the future of our kids gets decided" or some such, meaning where everything related to the kids' school or kindergarten is now discussed.
I agree though about the cultural influence of WhatsApp outside of the US, as what you described about it matches my experience about its use here in Romania.
People hate it with a passion, but its core model has always been having real friends on there. Followers etc. are just an add-on.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities that become a sort of privatized social network as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
I am on the lookout to find how the online thing looks like, and honestly, it always comes back to a facebook group. I hate facebook. But it is the option with the least friction, for now.
Every other option, adds friction. From single signups to downloading mobile apps.
I haven't checked sociables yet (gonna, as soon as I hit reply), but I'm letting you know of my thoughts because it's a problem addressed to everyone.
Cheers
Self-hosting content is really the only solution for a social network that doesn't include moderation. Any centralized datastore will be subject to local laws around the globe.
Step 1: create a walled garden by taking over parts of the internet.
Step 2: algorithmically shadowban everyone you don't like.
This leaves most people with no voice. The only acceptable things to say are what the moderators of like 3 popular forums agree with.
DAUs were 2.00 billion on average for December 2022, an increase of 4% year-over-year.
So I think public networks still seem far from dead.
For hundreds of millions in other countries, FB is the internet because it's cheaper than...the internet.
You're getting sidetracked by the word "private" instead of looking at the contextual meaning of the conversation people are having:
When grandparent poster (asim) wrote: >"and now people need to go back to something more real and private."
asim meant "private"=="less-visible-more-intimate-group".
You're talking about "private"=="walled-garden".
The threeseed's reply of "So I think public networks still seem far from dead" is responding to asim's usage of "private" and not yours.
I'm saying only your friends on Facebook will see your posts, so it is private, unlike twitter where the whole world will see them. And you can create groups if you want to have even more private discussions.
Twitter, LinkedIn are walled gardens, but public ones. Facebook is a private walled garden.
Compare it to a WhatsApp group: there one defines exactly the people who should see a given message. "Friends" becomes mixed between "true" friends, neighbors, colleagues, ... people you once we're closer with but passed ways to some degree, ... after a while it's semi-public at least unless you have a strict (un-)friending policy. For average users the visibility is also hard to understand.
I still think people better move from social networks to messaging services with people they actually have connections with (real life or digital).
Edit: Hey, I was not that wrong: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/zuckerberg-facebook-...
> > Public social networks will continue to be very important in people's lives—for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first.
> He acknowledges Facebook is an odd fit for this approach, saying, "frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing," but:
> > I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about.
That said, I agree the current iteration of public social networks is pretty rough.
Anyway, if HN was a closed network that would be good too. I don't see why the comments need to be public, I don't see why any of it needs to be public. I mean in 2009 a friend recommended it to me, but equally if it was invite only he could have sent me an invite. But that's the way I discovered most great things, someone I personally know told me about it or shared an invite. And I think if there was to be a great new network that it should actually be invite only, totally private and even then I think "public" spaces within that private domain should be limited to fixed size groups. On any given day, if a room has more than 10 people in it, I probably know I'm not going to enjoy that conversation or setting. I think its the same of the internet. Crowds are not cool, they're anxiety inducing. So 20 people max in a group.
Just because it is user-generated content does not make it a "social network"
TikTok, Twitter's "For you", Reels - all of them are considered to be social networks, and they depend on algorithmic feeds recommending content to you.
Moderating a big subreddit is not easy, you can go from having several chains of comments removed (eg. r/science) to getting flooded with bots (eg. reddit.com).
Of course that its actual traffic might still increase for some time, but it has lost the (counter-)cultural ascendency that it used to have. That's what you get for hiring a former Atlantic Council member as your "policy director".
Undercover the truth has been that social media has always been simply a channel for commercials, and they should embrace that truth and make it les sof a ponzi scheme, and more of an easy way to scroll through specific areas of interest for individual people. If social media was honest and fair, the metrics on consumer sentiment would be game-changingly valuable to everyone in business, but as of right now, pure corruption, deceptive marketing, and endless new schemes are being invented by people trying to leverage social media against the unaware masses on it.
Closed networks can be just as easily corrupted, and they can be weaponized against users with no way of anyone knowing what occurred. Closed systems can hide valuable knowledge and truth from the public, they create a nightmare for law enforcement as well in solving crimes perpetrated on groups or individuals, they also encourage maintaining multiple individual accounts and paywalls around data that does not need to be private... Neither solution is perfect. Many of the massive public social media services have been operating as if they are closed networks lately as they try to squeeze money and data out of users over time (e.g. Twitter not allowing posts to be accessed without having an account).
I am really tired myself of all the tricks, gimmics, and schemes that social media creates jus tin order to operate successfully on it, and new tools are often the same old schemes, but in reality, there is now barely any other cost-effective way to promote yourself to the world... Google search can also be kind of considered the same as social media in a way because many have to pay for prominent placing and manipulate keywords, and even do things like registering an SSL cert and pay hosting to be ranked higher on results... TikTok has basically become a massive video search engine on the flip side of that.
The problem is these networks thrive on free and coerced labor form content creators and businesses, they offer little reward for hard work, and they facilitate wide-scale fraud, info theft, ID impersonation, and disinformation. Those things need to be addressed thoroughly moving forward, or it will all turn into a desolate strip mall with little value to anyone but the land owners.
Facebook, is dead for them in terms of engagement because its the "old people" place and discoverability is quite bad outside of groups. I know many people who use Instagram for social/policy commentary in their stories, and its very inefficient because its one-way. Pictures do not allow for proper discussion or easy discoverability of comments.
Even tiktok has better interaction via duets and pushing up new content all the time but conversation is limited.
I believe that instagram is mainstream enough to entice this group into a forum-like experience and drive insane engagement. Currently, if you are not traveling or doing some kind of beauty influencing, instagram is dead and its successor (tiktok) is limited to short videos. There is a legit market for more long-form/term discussion place in that (very important) age group outside of the US especially.
I am bullish on the offer, especially since Twitter seems to be prioritising US.
Fuck engagement. Fuck the competitive scurrying for likes. Fuck Tiktok. Fuck 'the next' social network. I just want a place to post pictures for my friends and see theirs.
The ill-effects of social media were almost depressing and I stopped using them altogether. But this also meant I had almost no one initiate a conversation with me. If you have anything to say about how to best use social media healthily, I'm all ears.
I would suspect that zoomers who grew up on Tiktok are going to consume less social media as they age than previous generations. We are all are driven by a thirst for new experiences and a generation that grew up as digital meth heads are not going to be looking for something more powerful than meth.
Meta was probably a decent short Friday over $246.
I dunno, it’s a nice little closed network for me. I see updates from friends and family, only they see my updates, Insta has gotten pretty good at surfacing the cat videos I like to watch.
I don’t want to see the opinions of the general public or the political opinions of my friends (I’d much rather get both from professional journalists), and neither show up on my Instagram
Instagram is the public/open network. Share pictures and reels with whoever wants to see them. Groups fits into that more as you rarely have a group among your own friend set, but rather among a group of random individuals with similar interests. Meta has it upside down.
That has become an asset, people have grown tired of endless and pointless discussions.
Don't like it? Well, too bad, because that's how the app works now. Oh, and by the way, you can post whatever you want, unless the algorithms decide it's against the community standards, and even then, only the posts of upstanding digital citizens that promote the narrative they want will actually be shown to others.
And literally all of your online interactions are going through a few tech companies now. You don't have freedom of speech, expression or even thought, unless you comply with the Meta/Alphabet approved narrative.
*There is always the option to not participate if you prefer to sit in a closet with your Raspberry Pi.
To the extent that social media is like a village (a medium-to-large number of people expressing themselves), there have always been community standards in any society.
> mainstream social networks
People who sufficiently resent aspects of broader society can find smaller groups. These smaller groups will themselves have community standards.
The expectation of unfettered freedom of speech is at best naive, especially when the things people say incite violence.
When Meta says "community standards" they aren't actually community standards at all. Meta unilaterally decides what their "community standards" are. I've had posts about lighting a campfire for my family, and showing off vegetables from my garden flagged as "violating community standards". We're not even getting into sex, religion and politics, which I also believe are areas of life that we need to be able to have open conversations about in public forums, rather than having an unaccountable organization unilaterally decide for us what is right and wrong.
> The expectation of unfettered freedom of speech is at best naive, especially when the things people say incite violence.
Given the tendency for violence to be associated with calls for free speech, I understand how you could assume that I'm talking about speech that incites violence. But actually, I'm talking about much more innocuous things like talking about non-traditional relationship styles, alternative lifestyles, body positivity, open medical data, thought experiments and well thought out challenges to the status quo.
Meta would never do that.
This can be interesting.
File under: “Obvious things to do when you think about it”, really.
For the rest of us, it's actually better than it's ever been, especially if you're like me and living outside of North America. It's snappier and more open than Twitter 1.0, and it's not banning people at the behest of the FBI.
Car Man: so-so
Twitter Man: bad
But Twitter was already a pit before he bought it. He fired all the people who held the line on its ongoing degradation, so it's getting worse.
What's actually different about it other than it loads faster and the For You feed is good now?
There is a tidbit in there about "compatibility" with other networks, including Mastodon; I wonder if their implementation of the protocol will include Mastodon reaching into their garden. If it does, I might believe they have learned something.
* Copy what works
* Build re-usable internal systems so you can quickly go from prototypes to millions of users
* Internal competition where teams are trying to create the same product and outdo other internal teams
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that Meta can successfully copy Chinese companies. One major reason is that software developers in the US are significantly more expensive so you have to be more strategic.
Chinese companies are dominating in social apps. TikTok is just the start.
https://hbr.org/2022/02/how-bytedance-became-the-worlds-most...
https://hbr.org/2022/02/how-bytedance-became-the-worlds-most...
That's not really a safeguard against "extinguishing". When you become the first mover, your extensions to the protocol/platform drive out competitors that cannot afford to interoperate with you.
Actually, it may be pretty easy for a Meta-owned AP instance to drive out a lot of competitors. It definitely won't have the space/compute/bandwidth constraints of the average instance, and can work around most protocol warts by just throwing money at them. At the same time, federating with it might have a huge cost for a small instance.
> Tagline: “Instagram for your thoughts.”
That will be a hard no from me thanks.
If I see a post about a new Lisp dialect (something I have no interest in), commenting "That will be a hard no from me thanks." is a waste of time and space.
That's the joy of HN. You get the folks who are bullish on a 'new' idea, and those who aren't.
But I am interested in social media apps, its hard not to be these days. I just don't see the point from Meta's point of view, apart from more data collection maybe, and I don't see the point from the users point when Mastodon and Twitter are doing this, with arguably more respect for their users than Meta.
There is demand for a Twitter clone that is closer to what it was before Musk joined.
Therefore as a pure business opportunity it makes a lot of sense.
This have the potential to do it well for Instagrammer that wants a new medium but in a platform that is not for shitposting and memes. However when you think about it, it's just Facebook all over again :D
I wonder if, collectively, people will ever stop falling for this kind of bait & switch.
This is Meta wanting data for its LLMs aware of the latest trends and news-worthy events as they happen. Probably generate ad videos and banners on-the-fly, even?
Then the LLMs got popular and maybe they think they can use the content for LLMs too.
Instagram is great for visual artists, but its extreme focus on images (and short videos) seems to favour shallow ideas. Text seems more appropriate to my likings.
Even people I have enormous respect for intellectually end up coming off as unfunny comedians, obnoxious and vapid performance artists or political hacks.
Brands already have limited ad spend with the global economy the way it is. And the fact that this will be a new channel that will be highly effective, work with their existing tools and require no additional effort will be compelling.
And that will extinguish what little revenue Musk hasn't fettered away. Twitter is finished.
They really hate boobs over at Meta.
Women show off their cameltoes and boobs, there's even hardcore porn that's not being removed despite being reported on Instagram. But if you dare to post "Nice boobs" when the poster starts off to show her nice boobs, it's "harassment".
At least they should revert back to 140-200 character limit. Twitters extended tweets is a mistake and are degrading it
To me it's an obvious move. Try to move in when Twitter is in an odd transitional period. Not saying I have any interest in using it, but from a strategy standpoint it makes complete sense.