Ask HN: Should I build a new community app platform?

I think focused communities are where it's at. Why? Because focused communities have needs that aren't served via general-purpose platforms like Facebook.

Example:

Running communities tend to want to share their runs. Facebook is really bad for that, so they gravitate to apps that auto-plot their runs on a map. They might share a screenshot on FB with their friends, but FB isn't enough form them. And FB will never add that feature (auto-mapping runs) to their platform because it just isn't used enough.

Another example:

Let's say you're an EV data freak and want to plot range/mph/temperature/electricity usage data for your EV. Well, you can upload that into a site (any site) as raw data...or take a picture...but wouldn't it be better if you could embed that data into a site so other people who share your obsession could use it for their analysis? Then you could plot general EV usage stats vs temperature vs speed for EVs around the world.

Basically, general-purpose platforms are good at lowest-common-denominator sharing, but if you really want to dig into the data they're not going to work so well.

There's always room for more platforms. Whether it's a wide-ranging platform is sort of irrelevant at the start. Remember, Facebook was created so people could connect with each other before college started (and a facebook was a bunch of headshots that the registrar sent out to everyone so you could theoretically recognize people).

If the site is focused enough and meets a community's needs and is not a PITA, users will flock there. That assumes you do some kind of marketing, of course.

No, please no... We need standards, not yet another encapsuled platform, no matter how open its source code is.

Well part of that effort is that I'm working on a standard protocol for communication. But I don't think the protocol alone is the answer. It's definitely part of the solution but you need to actually build the rest of the solution too.

https://mu.xyz/network#protocol

[insert xkcd comic about standards]

We already have ActivityPub, no point in trying to reinvent the wheel without a critical mass of users and services.

Mastodon + Lemmy + Pixelfed are built on ActivityPub, what does your protocol bring to the table?

Well I guess I've spent two decades in software, networks and distributed systems engineering, especially quite significantly in protocols and platforms. It's not that I want to create some new protocol, it's that there's a certain inadequacy in the existing ones for service to service communication e.g http was made for hypertext transfer, its for web pages. More modern protocols like gRPC have tried to do this thing but as rpc with a binary protocol that is largely obtuse and has not shown itself to be more widely adopted as a standard for open services.

I think ActivityPub is specifically geared around social communication whereas I'm thinking more like the services layer or what we currently do in random ad-hoc ways as HTTP APIs.

For me, the protocol is about creating something very standard for API services that are human readable and can exist alongside SMTP and HTTP. Again, didn't set out to create yet another protocol, I'm just not seeing great standards around services.

Personally, I think its great to think about protocols and the tech that goes into it... but only because its interesting to me technically.

Some of this kind of sounds like: I have a cool protocol and now Im in search of a problem that I can apply it to. What app should I duplicate first?

You need to flip this around and ask: what kind of service can I build that would deliver new or additional value to users, that is a significant enough improvement that users will switch en mass.

Then go do that, get a bunch of users, and then release your protocol and encourage others to participate.

There's nothing wrong with doing it all in parallel, but the primary problem -- getting users -- is large enough to consume all of your energy.

EDIT: Or become a protocol evangelist... write your protocol, document it well, and start advocating it and explaining the advantages... maybe you can get Lemmy and other platforms to adopt it instead of ActivityPub. You can also write up patches to add support for it to various open source projects. Let them worry about building the remaining parts of solving the social problem... there's definitely room for multiple groups to work on solving this problem together.

Well, to come up with the applications, you just have to go back to the original rationale to use computers: to automate the generation of some kind of answer to a question. The automation should be either equal to or higher quality than a manual alternative, or so much faster and cheaper that lower quality is acceptable.

When we look at that in terms of service interfaces, it's an attempt to black-box some part of answer generation, to say "this other party will do that"...which means that it's orthogonal to the answer itself. The most direct way to get good answers would be to already know them, and everything else, like the question you ask of an interface, is secondary. Interfaces tend to be a point of friction to accessing answers because they have to assume in some sense that you know what you want to ask and how you want to phrase it. If you got the right answer from asking the wrong question you'd be extremely pleased but also confused.

So it helps to establish concretely what kinds of questions are asked for each application, and turn those into interface specs. That's where a lot of the design challenge is - capturing the question/answer cycle succinctly, without overgeneralizing.

> starting with one critical piece of software we all care about

Besides programmers, no-one cares about software. They only care about getting "whatever" done. So if your audience is only programmers, go for it!

I second this. Don’t think about the tech or what yiu can do with your skills. Obsess about the problem.

Look at the graveyards of social networks. I remember Peach, for example. And there are many more that just had to shut down because they didnt reach critical mass. Why would people use this service? Same question always… Of course yours could just be the one that takes off ultimately, but chances are its a wasted effort. Maybe use your energy to build something else…?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach_(social_network)

I am currently giving it a try with Knowii, under the AGPL: https://github.com/knowii-oss

I haven't written all that much about it so far, but my idea is to focus on community knowledge management.

IMHO, communities have enough places to hold their discussions. I think communities need a platform where they can build/store/organize their knowledge, share ideas, useful resources, etc. More focus on knowledge and people, and less on conversations.

Let's say you build it. It exists and people use it. Huge success, 100_000 MAU.

Do you want to deal with porn uploads, illegal uploads, illegal posts, violence, potential doxxing from both sides of the lunatic asylum?

Personally that's why I didn't build something like this.

The solution is distributed, but not "federated" - those systems are god awful to use as an end user. There's a third solution I've been thinking about for many years now.

You have the right idea. I don't believe in federation in the way the "fediverse" is approaching it. I think distributed works but with centralised coordination. It means people have to join a network and any bad actor can be banned from the network.

> Is it worth the time and effort to attempt to establish an open alternative to the app platforms of today?

It's already here, it's called the Web.

You could quibble about the main browser engines being created by FAANG, but it's still a remarkably open platform. You can fork Chromium if you really want.

> while those companies have provided immense value

My gut reaction is the same as you say you've already heard. I think that the existing platforms have not provided much value at all, and instead have been detrimental to our world. But that might not be a fair reaction -- what value are you seeing from the big social platforms?

Because if you can identify the value that a new platform would offer, and build from scratch with specific positive goals in mind, maybe something could work. But if you are talking about starting with email or chat... those aren't the core values of FAANG platforms anyway, so I'm not sure you are clear on a vision for where you would go with a new platform. And without a solid vision and clear intent, I'd have to answer, "No", don't build it.

Just curious. You are already hard at work on the proposal. The micro repo shows it was created 2 years ago. Are you beginning to have doubts about continuing (maybe, given the scepticism and dismissals you receive)?

I feel a lot of the dismissive folks are ones thinking hyperscale, unicorns, big tech, growth hacking, network effects, and above all big monetization. But that is not where one has to go. It is certainly a tough challenge to get to be self-sustainable. Good community isn't found in the big numbers, and decent salary needn't be too.

I'm not really having doubts but I am trying to figure out the right way to approach this. I have spent many years writing code thinking as an engineer if I just built the technical solutions I would figure out the rest but it's clear this isn't about code. Any of us could implement this. What really matters is developing mindshare. I previously bootstrapped the open source project and went on to raise VC funding. In the months before raising money I had become disillusioned with my efforts. I had to stop coding and use a different skill to convince investors to give me a chance. In this scenario I do feel it's the same only this time I need to convince the developer community that this is worthwhile and maybe crowdfund to get started?

If we cater to the few who really care, maybe it's enough to at least build something self sustaining for us and the people around us.

Can relate to that. You could check out the fediverse. There's plenty people with the mindshare there, and the ecosystem is moving on from microblogging towards stronger communities and technical support for them.

Your proposal lists reasons for why your platform should exist, but it doesn't list any reason why a user would want to use it. Who are you serving? What should they want to sign up?

Most of what we use now is profit seeking, everything is built to fuel an addiction and increase screen time as opposed to being a utility that benefits you. As a user the idea is that you'd actually be free from that. The technology would work for you, not the other way around.

I'd like to work on one that maybe uses ai/ml to basically learn the stuff that I'm interested in, and then rank it by most interesting - again based on previous interests. Essentially clone myself on the app, and then only see the stuff that is probably worth seeing the most.

The link to the proposal https://mu.xyz/proposal

"They were not built based on how we live our lives or the way we interact with people and the world around us."

I think you're going about this wrong and I think this belief is why.

I have very little social media (pretty much just HN). These companies have no real power over your life. Facebook is just a website... no more significant than dig or slashdot. They have no power to force you to do anything. You can leave any time you want.

So the question is, why do people use these services? For the exact opposite of your sentence above: because they ARE built around how people live their lives.

People aren't on LinkedIn just because it exists; they're there to create a network to find work. That's a function that existed before LinkedIn... starting with either your first job or during university; or through friends and family.

Or take WhatsApp, which enables sending small messages. Examples of sending small messages: carrier pigeons; telegrams (average length: 12 characters); walkie-talkies; pagers; SMS... and then more recently: chat apps and Twitter. So the behavior already existed before chat existed. So why did people move to WhatsApp when SMS already existed and was so similar? Because when WhatsApp started, SMS was $0.10/message and WhatsApp was free.

So whatever function you decide to start with, I think you need to understand the underlying reason people use that service... and what the current platform is delivering that the users find valuable. If you stop viewing it as something being shoved down your throat, you'll see all of these platforms are enabling something of value.

Additionally I would caution you against just duplicating something that already exists. What you're really doing is duplicating a specific solution to an already solved problem. And then the question arises: why would would people pay switching costs for no gain? And the answer is they won't.

Many of the disgruntled former users of these platforms--disgruntled because they're deprived of the value the platform was delivering--are exactly the type of users you do not want on your platform. But these are the users that will be open to using your platform, because they have the lowest switching costs.

There can be an opening for a duplicate when a platform (like reddit or twitter) starts destroying some of their value.. and if you're positioned as a prominent alternative at the time that happens, users may start switching over. But it's easier for the existing platform to restore the value they removed than it is for millions of users to switch to your platform. So I'd argue this strategy is essentially the same as buying a lottery ticket... hoping they f up big enough and long enough for you to win.