How to run a small social network (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How to run a small social network (2019)

runyourown.social

114 pointsGoRudy112 comments

I run a small social network with absolutely no technology at all. Usually consists of six or seven of us sitting in a coffee shop or a bar.

It was never broke so stop trying to fix it.

I envy the consistency you have to seemingly get a large group of you folks regularly. Any tips that make it possible for y'all to schedule this?

When I was in a band, someone in the group said "Practice is on Tuesday and on Saturday" and we all stuck to it for a few years. Sometimes we'd even get together on a weekday to play a show, where even more people would show up.

It helps to have a reason to get together. At a certain point early in life, I think most people adopt a "no agenda, no attenda" attitude towards socializing.

> "no agenda, no attenda" attitude towards socializing

As the proverbial people-networking advice goes, "What is the person whose time I'm asking for getting out of meeting? And what can I give them? And how can I make that a win/win?"

Folks have an aversion to spending limited time to show up and hope something happens. Better to make the something explicit.

That feels sociopathic in the context of socializing. As if you need to have something to gain in order to bother spending time with people.

How often do we plan to spend time without getting something?

That might be fun, catching up, sexual attraction, familial obligation, or religious duty... but it's something.

Better to be intentional and up-front when asking others, rather than expecting a reason to materialize out of the ether (and them to agree to spend the time without knowing it).

Pick a regularly scheduled time, let everyone know they're welcome to come, and don't make them feel bad if they miss. Source: I've been co-hosting an online Hackathon with about 4-6 people on Wednesday nights for 10 years.

My tip is you pick some sort of weekly thing that you all show up to. For example, if religion is your thing, going to services is a super easy one. That's what I do and I know I'll see my friends there every week. But it could be trivia night, bowling league, whatever. You pick something important enough and people will schedule around it. Sure it's more effort than signing in to facebook, but the reward is greater.

We just decided it’s important. We have no agenda or goals, the only goal is to get together. And to support each other. We have arguments we laugh. It’s all over the place.

You just have to convince people that human socialization in person is important. If you have any exterior motive for doing it, I don’t think it will be as valuable. People need a time to just relax and get things off their chest and talk to people.

It's important to priority quality and consistency over quality.

That way when there it's 2-3 people or 10-15 the type and depth of conversations can vary.

It's a treat either way to have a few longer and deeper conversations, or maybe a different format with more people available..

Typo: It's important to priority quality and consistency over QUANTITY

Who else’s dad would have made this exact comment on the topic if given the chance?

Personally if I had the power to still rally six or seven people that easily and consistently I wouldn’t waste it on sitting at a bar or coffee shop.

This is the problem. You think it’s a waste, but it’s not. Just because you’re not doing something productive doesn’t mean it’s fulfilling in many invisible ways. It’s great to sit around, seemingly doing nothing but getting so much out of it.

We don’t have to have goals or be productive or have side gigs all the time. Just relax.

What would you do instead?

A Discord server seems to meet many of my “small social network” needs. The hacker spirit of this post is fun but it can be hard to get friends to value it as much as the person running it might.

The article mentions "your job is social first, technical second" but seems to focus mostly on the technical aspects. Was hoping to find more advice for the social aspects.

Created a tiny Discord for some friends and have been wondering what I can do to make it worth spending time on (specifically, how do I make it more interesting than all the other servers they could be spending time on--if I just copy what I've seen works, then I'll probably just have the same thing with less activity).

Worth mentioning my specific intention was to foster the sort of high quality discussion that is possibly unique to this website. So I guess I'm wondering if HN's recipe can be replicated, and what's the secret sauce. Strong rules and moderation? But the culture seems to play a big role too.

It’s funny how even a tiny project like this gives rise to the question “How do we boost engagement?”

Err, if your friends don't want to chat with you, I don't think there's much you can do. Maybe they're just busy? Or maybe you'd be better off doing other activities with them (multiplayer games etc) if you want to hang out.

The secret to HN is YCombinator, so I guess fund a wildly successful startup accelerator and get the people orbiting those startups to participate.

Seconded. I have a friend group from college that moved from a Facebook group (due to several people quitting facebook) through a couple different services before settling on Discord.

When we were initially discussing moving off Facebook I looked at self-hosted options, including mastodon, but we explicitly did not want federation—just a private group for us.

Sounds like a good idea. What you want fits right in the 'private group chat' category, it seems. As opposed to 'public group chat' (like HN) and also opposed to 'private one-to-one chat'.

I'm struggling with the following question and I also want to ask you the same question: Would you want anything other than the functionality Whatsapp has to offer? Why didn't you already use Whatsapp or an equal solution?

I've never used Whatsapp. It didn't even come up as an option when we were initially discussing alternatives to Facebook (ca. 2018), so presumably none of my friend group use it regularly either.

Sounds logical. Thanks for answering.

I am not complaining too much, because lets face it, it works. however it always feel wrong when people talk about "their" discord server. there is no way to run your own discord server, you are merely a digital serf thankful for the opportunity to use discords server.

signed: a person who maintains a mumble server... that no one uses.

How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565 - Dec 2021 (209 comments)

How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604023 - Sept 2021 (1 comment)

How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970 - July 2019 (60 comments)

It might be neat if upon re-submission every few years, the system auto-pins these.

They are all valuable including the current view to see how it might change/evolve.

I'll have to look into HN's experience with helpful bots in the past (or not)

HN doesn't really allow bots.

Which is lovely, can you imagine how many bots there would be, posting "helpful" comments that are just noise?

Yup, if the feature was useful it could be added to the platform

Social networks are platforms.

They get more valuable the more people are on it. Imagine a platform with 100 people on it. Nobody's going to put effort into putting content on that.

Now look at something like X, Youtube, TikTok. It's a storm of content, because that's where the eyeballs are.

These sorts of sites should really be called Content Sharing sites or something.

I care about a social networking site because my social network is on it, not because some third party goes through effort to post content. I want content from sites like hackernews because it is interesting in and of itself. I want posts of my parents’ dog because I care about my parents.

These are two totally different use cases and I don’t see what we gain from conflating them.

This is why Facebook sucks (it combines the two), while Reddit was good for a long time (of course Reddit has gone downhill in implementation, but the concept is solid).

I've pretty much always had this problem when making niche social networks. Get 30-50 people sign up, it gets some very mild interaction in the first month (by typically only a few of the people who signed up), and then dies. (Maybe happened in 5-6 different groups over the years people have started.)

I've taken this to mean the individuals in the group just don't really need another social platform. But I do wonder if there is a better way to get small communities like this to engage so it is more spread out.

That's slightly different from my experience, in which I built a niche social network for music explorers, but it also has bookmarking features.

I noticed a sustained usage from very few people (perhaps 10-20 users), even after a year.

So clearly there's some value other than the social aspect of the site. Not sure what to make of it though.

The way other platforms did it is by either being the first and getting rapid growth that way, or by being exclusive and building your appeal. Facebook did the latter - first Harvard only, then a couple more uni's, and by that time they had the critical mass to sustain a proper platform.

Disagree with that statement. Social media started it's decline when they became platforms. That's the thing ruining it. Facebook was fun-ish when it was just friends posting party pics and became bad when it started to become a one directional platform for non personal accounts.

So social networks are great except for all the damn people on it?

The people who joined before you are the cool people, those who joined after you are the ones ruining everything.

How did you get that from my comment?

I said all the non-personal accounts. Accounts using it as a platform. Celebrity brands, business accounts, influencer, anything that's one directional. Maybe technically they are "people" but they're using it in a one directional way

Ah yes I see what you're saying now.

What I meant by "platform" is that it's a meeting place for many people and it only has value because there's a lot of people already there.

> Nobody's going to put effort into putting content on that.

Why not? Most people just want to show stuff to their friends, they don't care about being influencers and so on.

If people just want to show things to friends, then they just need a file host. Social networks "just for friends" are a dime a dozen now.

Since most simple "just for friends"-quality platforms aren't thriving, we can assume this assumption is wrong.

The concept is thriving though, it's group texts, dm groups, emails, chat apps.

There is just no reason to go onto an app for it

I agree. But those are not social media platforms. Which I'll reiterate my point: People do not use social media platforms just to share things with friends. You don't need a social media platform to text your friends. There exists other motivations for people to use social media platforms. Without those other motivations being satisfied, the platform is no better than email/group chat/etc, which are all easy to swap to or from, making it useless.

The fact that people both use social media and have off-platform group chats should indicate that they serve different purposes.

> The fact that people both use social media and have off-platform group chats should indicate that they serve different purposes.

Do you mean that social media platforms are distinctively for exploring content outside the people you know? Leaving aside the technical side, it seems to always come down to a social spectrum of public/private. From open web to social media like FB and Twitter to private group chats to private one-to-one chats. Another spectrum seems to be the one between topic/content-focused on one side and people/social-focused on the other, and everything in between.

I think this is something more akin to a small WhatsApp group. And people definitely post on those.

Since I stopped using Facebook, my "Family" Whatsapp group is almost the only way I have to keep in touch with my extended family. Several of us post regularly, exactly because we only want our relatives to see our posts.

> They get more valuable the more people are on it.

That depends on your definition of value. I am craving for a small easy-to-use platform for people who are maybe all interested in a certain activity, talk about it, know each other, and support each other. Hopefully, that platform would stay so small that it would not be worth it to flood it with crap content made just as an advertising vehicle, fake reviews, narcissists trying to get attention, and all that crap that comes with the size.

Also, let me question a bit your claim that eyeballs are on X, etc. - I kind of agree, but only if we are talking about people who already have an audience. If you start on Twitter now, nobody will hear you. It's like shouting into emptiness. You have to scream really loud to get attention... and not everybody wants to be a screamer.

Am I wrong? Is it still possible to build an audience by being authentic, without things like commenting not because you have something to say but because you want to get noticed? Or YouTube... is it still possible to be seen without chasing retention and all the things Mr Beast talks about?

I miss those days of small internet when you could start a blog just for fun, about something that you simply liked, and people would somehow find you without the need to stuff your content with SEO words, do social media, link-building, and god knows what else people have to do these days.

Or maybe... am I turning into a "good old days" old dude?

I'm still operating a vBulletin that started out as a PhpBB 20+ years ago, and I think we still have regulars in the hundreds - though it used to be the thousands. Ostensibly, it's a community around Nine Inch Nails, but realistically it's always been community first, band fandom second. It's just the band was the impetus to get the people into the proverbial room.

> They get more valuable the more people are on it. Imagine a platform with 100 people on it. Nobody's going to put effort into putting content on that.

Self-hosting and network size are independent. What matters is how many people use the protocol.

If Alice has her own instance and she's the only one on it, she should still be able to go to any other instance and seamlessly make a post as alice@aliceserver . Then she (i.e. her server) gets notified if the people there reply to it, anyone there can follow her and have her posts from her own server show up in their feed etc.

If the protocol was popular then your self-hosted server that only five people use would be in a network with a billion people. See email.

Yup. Weird internet never went anywhere. You’ve always been able to find bespoke, organic, locally owned, premium grade A hipster indie stuff online.

It’s just not as popular to as many people.

Most effort is spent in local group chats of around 100 people. The thing is they are local, and occasionally people meet in real life.

An exclusive golf club for billionaires is also a platform. Of around 100 people. That most people would kill to penetrate.

I think most of the ordinary people, myself included, wouldn't know what to tell them. What am I going to do with them? Ask them for money? Convince to invest in my idea?

Discuss golf?

True. The quality of a platform is also based on the quality of the people. And your example is more of the same: perceived opportunities for money or power.

The quality of the content, at least. Reddit grew by having the co-founders use sockpuppet accounts to cross-post things from other link aggregator sites.

You are so wrong, check out Subreply.

This push for everyone to have their own empty social network site (not distinguishable from 1 billion other sites on the same code) is very strange.

The alternative is more strange.

In Europe not too long ago my partner and I called in to an undergroundish bar of the kind we used to frequent when we were younger for a beer on the way back from dinner.

It's the sort of place where people write on the walls, and I couldn't help but notice how many instagram tags there were.

Properly articulating why I felt like it was a shame that the one thing a lot of these young adults wanted to share was a link to their little ad-gated corner of a big tech company's garden would probably need more space than I've got here.

There's even an "opt in to tracking or pay" ultimatum on Instagram there.

It's nice to have a space to talk to your friends, and be the one setting the rules about what kind of behavior isn't okay in this space, instead of that space being owned by a corporation whose rules are largely designed to maximize their profits.

Before the modern social media era there were billions of PHPBB sites that were largely differentiated only by the crowds who used them, and the choices the moderators made. It's really nice to have that back with some federation added in.

That's literally what the web was born to be, or at least the dream in the 90s. Not for profit, enabling learning and communication (and commerce, but not of human data). It was about expression, experimentation, freedom.

You thinking individuals hosting their own site is weird, is weird to me.

Why? Isn’t that essentially what self hosted wordpress is? Aren’t people running the same OSes everywhere? You don’t have to visit them all and they all don’t need to be unique if they’re different sites.

The push for people to all be on the same platform and a single code base run by a marketing company is the strange thing.

Most people interested in using social networks have no interest in running a WordPress site or care/know about the details of an OS outside of the fact that it allows them to access the internet.

Self-hosting a social network brings them no benefit.

Okay then they can use a non-self hosted service then. Doesn’t mean that getting people off singularly owned and operated marketing platforms is a bad idea or a strange concept.

Everyone wants to be an owner.

I think more specifically a lot of people don't want to be owned or controlled.

Yes, because that goes against the desire to own and be in control (of self, of things, of time, of outcomes, of others, etc).

Framing everything as a matter of ownership is a weird part of a capitalist dystopia. Why does it have to be "they own you or you own you"? Why can't the concept of "owning you" just not exist?

> It behaves just like Mastodon with one important change: the only letter you are allowed to use is "E".

I loved this, this indeed is what open source is about!

E’e eee eeee E eeee ee.

Has everyone forgotten about phpbb? (Or whatever the slightly more modern forum software is…) Historically forums are the most successful small social networks.

Not sure what your experience is, for me forums still work great but they have transitioned from general social hangouts to very specialized niche communities. I don't mind that and still get a lot of value from e.g. music production forums like Mod Wiggler and Gearspace. However, other than HN I don't frequent any other small-ish communities where conversations can go outside of the stated purpose.

Another shameless plug: I created the first social network for Gemini and have been running that for a couple of years now: https://martinrue.com/station

> So what do you, the reader, do next?

Sadly (for me), this section only lists alternatives like Mastodon and Pleroma (for Twitter), Pixelfed for Instagram and PeerTube for YouTube. What I would like to see is something like Facebook Groups, which is topic/community focused, allows anyone to post (assuming admins allow), allows anyone in the group to respond or follow, etc. Even something like Reddit may be similar. Twitter and Instagram clones are good for following a few people and occasionally interacting with them, but to me they seem cumbersome with the "one to many" nature of their networks/graphs.

Not sure if you’ve looked at urbit and the tlon app, but it’s come a long way for groups.

It also doesn’t rely on a benevolent administrator like mastodon does, each user has their own urbit tied to their ID.

Disclaimer that I work on it, but I think it does a better job of solving the underlying issues than federated setups like mastodon.

https://tlon.io/

I have been digging a small, awesome site called Blue Dwarf (https://bluedwarf.top/cackle/index.php). It is everything you described above except I don't know if it is like Facebook groups or not because I haven't used Facebook.

Lemmy, a Reddit clone?

Shameless plug: https://rings.social (GPLv3) is my attempt to build a Reddit-like social network.

This is my second attempt after OpenDolphin [1] (demo [2]), but the problem remains the same: finding a good amount of people to bootstrap the social network.

[1]: https://about.opendolphin.social/ [2]: https://app.opendolphin.social/

If you make it Lemmy-compatible, you don't need other people to be on your server.

I've been building something that could be described as a "professional social network SaaS" [1]. Most of the users are VC funds that connect founders in a network.

I think the thing that is most under-appreciated is keeping people engaged over time. Facebook kept people coming back because it was the universal network. As social media fragments, people assume that others will just stick around in a Discord/Slack/Circle/etc. But, the reality is that ~75% of people stop returning after a month. And, most social networks see that 90% of members read instead of engage - so the format needs to work for people who prefer to just read.

I solve this in my product by sending a email summary every day to keep people informed. My opinion is that the defining characteristic of any social network software is how it keeps people engaged over time - whether it's email newsletter, SMS, push notifications, or desktop pop-ups. The time and place people see notifications is closely related to the network audience, and how notifications work as audience size scales matters. A software that assumes that people will just remember to come back without reminders is going to taper off slowly in engagement.

We'll never have another universal social network like Facebook in 2010. So, as networks splinter - think about when and how often people need to engage, and work backwards on the software from those needs.

[1] https://booklet.group

I run a Slack server with about 80 people, maybe a quarter are regularly active. Is that a social network? I’m not on FB, Instagram, X, etc so it feels like my only social network.

This is my attempt to tick all boxes. Small codebase, two languages (Go and SQL), easy deployment and no frameworks/ORMs, ActivityPub support and a lightweight text-based interface.

https://github.com/dimkr/tootik

When app.net finally went away Dalton and Berg open sourced a fair bit of the underlying technology. Two small social networks were born for people that did not want to give up the communities they had found on app.net. PNut.io uses the same backbone that app.net did. I’m not sure about the underlying software that 10centuries.org uses.

Both of them feature microblogging but also offer other features. 10centuries also allows regular blogging and pnut has private messages as well as #mondaynightdanceparty. Every monday 9:30 PM EST people log into mndp.tv and request videos. We all watch them and comment.

It’s a lot of fun. Not being open to every rando on the internet does lead to a better experience.

With all the shameless plugs in the comments, anyone know of a social media network that focuses on following topics instead of individuals?

I'm talking about reddit back when it was still good. You follow interesting topics, celebrities can have their own topic, but you cannot follow everything an individual user does.

Following everything an individual does is kinda creepy to me, I feel like we've taken a wrong turn there with social media.

You can follow hashtags on the Fedi, and some accounts are "groups".

Feels like mailing lists.

I don't use that, but AFAIK on most existing social networks you can follow tags instead of users.

You can yes, but they're also primarily focused on following users. Can you disable that part?

I'm no ActivityPub expert but I'd want a software that does not publish individual user actions to activitystreams, only if they're done on a topic. And then you can only be notified of the action if you subscribe to the topic.

Kinda exactly like how reddit works but without the option to follow user accounts, that came much later.

The only thing I can think of is hosting your own ActivityPub server (e.g. Mastodon) and customizing the theme. Maybe that's the future of more individually-tailored online experiences.

I'm not sure customizing the theme will cut it. Because it's usually a background process queue that handles adding messages to an outbox and making them available for subscription by other users and instances.

So I think support needs to be integrated into the software.

Right, I partially misunderstood your idea. For notifications and such you would need to modify the source code at a deeper level. But for just customizing the home feed (update steam?) changing the theme might be enough.

Ideally there should be a personal ActivityPub instance implementation, something that doesn't require hosting all Mastodon content and can be easily customized in various ways.

Stacker.news tries to be a new reddit of sorts.

Step 1:

Create thousands of fake accounts and create active daily engagement among users

Start Telegram channel. No big tech bs and very easy to run.

For many people Telegram will never be a viable option. It has strong ties to Russia and is being run from Dubai. While maybe it's not big tech (i.e. Silicon Valley), it definitely lacks trust as an entity.

> I think a good CoC should be specific enough that it is actively repulsive to some people. And frankly, the more people who are repulsed by it the better.

I'd say that in this case, the best version is the one that names explicitly people who are allowed and others need not apply.

But then again... It's actually an interesting train of thought. How should I repulse, in one simple sentence, both right-wing and left-wing nutsoes? How can I make sure the result of this repellent is not an empty set?

But then again, maybe only the nuttiest ones should be repelled, and the rest will read the room...

Honest answer: moderation. If you think someone is a nutso, ban them. And people who are like them won't find many friends there anymore. Having an airtight CoC is important for big networks that need transparency but if its your personal space you don't need to worry too much

And yea, the allow list method is pretty good depending on the vibe. I feel a lot more comfortable in my 10 person discord of people I know personally. If that's the energy youre going for it totally works

You could try "Free speech, but don't be a dick". Let-wing nutsoes will be repelled because they think you're right wing because you said "free speech", and right-wing nutsoes will be banned because they want to be dicks.

I don't think the contents of the CoC are as important as the content of the site. Left wing people dont hate free speech, they hate seeing posts by right wing people (often attacking them) and dont want to be in that space. And the same is true for right wing people, look at how censored Truth Social is. You want the vibes of the space to be comfortable for the people you want to attract. As for the CoC wording, hackernews's is pretty good for a well moderated high profile site with a specific vision: posts should be curious, don't be mean, etc.

The question was about repelling "left-wing nutsoes", not normal left-wing people.

I stand by that nutsos of any denomination aren't likely to be reading your CoC closely, and that the main use of one is to make your moderation more justifiable.

That's true. I don't see a point in CoCs because they don't actually change anything about the moderation you were already going to do.

Enforce a no politics rule.

I like a nuanced discussion of politics. I just don’t like a notion that there should be a simple solution to every complex problem.

unless you like talking politics, it's your social media :p

the nice part about being small is theres less obligation to be impartial

We have a group that solves this problem with a free tier slack instance.

Recently I've seen "small web" sites referred to generically as "tildes", despite some sites trying to claim that name for themselves (e.g. tildes.net).

The tilde (~) has been used as a prefix for usernames on multi-user UNIX systems for a very long time.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/423962/what-is-a-ti...

In fact, I believe some of these small websites are just UNIX systems that allow the public to have accounts in them.

(2019)

Since fediverse has become much more of a thing since 2019, there are more recent resources on setting up your own

Like Paul Stamatiou's extensive Hosting your own Mastodon server

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761283

More discussion:

Then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565

Reply on news.ycombinator.com