Daft Social: Anti-social social network for minimalists | Hacker News Reader

Daft Social: Anti-social social network for minimalists

daftsocial.com

180 pointsflobosg80 comments

Posterous introduced this 'Post by Email' concept. Really loved the simplicity of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous

I'm sure others allowed posting by email before. BrightKite was a fantastic social network that was location-based, and you could post via email. My friends and I still miss it... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightkite

Wordpress had/has this capability, too.

I tried something along those lines a few years ago… https://publicemails.com

I absolutely loved Posterous, major shame it was squashed after being bought(?).

MSN Spaces had this feature back in 2006! Makes me feel nostalgic!

Oh man, the nostalgia I just had. I used a Peek to post to Posterous.

Hello, I do not know if someone from Daft is reading this thread, but you should not use contiguous ids

https://daftsocial.com/daftsocial/?id=201

Doesn't that just help with discovery? That doesn't seem like a bad practice here.

Discovering random threads to spam in doesn't help with discovery for users.

"daft", "discovery", "random"… I feel like I'm in a Daft Punk music thread.

You can't spam a thread if there is no "thread" feature implemented?

I'm sure they're not really overly concerned about security, but email addresses get logged everywhere on the Internet. Accounts would be pretty easy to hijack. Maybe that makes it more fun though.

I don't think they take security any less seriously than most social networks. If you're worried the sending/receiving servers have access to the email address, then it seems you would have to be equally concerned account recovery via email considering most email is not encrypted.

The target email address basically includes a secret that allows you to post by sending an email to it. It's not the same thing as clicking on an email you receive to reset a password. I can't reset your password just by knowing the email address associated with your Facebook account. I'd have to intercept the password reset email.

I personally love low-security social networks. I consider HN to qualify (as you just need a username and password, no email verification).

Small social networks can get away with it b/c they aren't big enough targets for abusers.

Not exactly social media, but when Instapaper came out they only used usernames, no password. I think the idea was that no one would care enough to delete your read it later list, and it wasn’t big enough to draw much attention. I remember it being like this for quite a long time.

Account security is a bigger concern for the network than it is for the user. If someone steals my HN account, I won't really care (it's around my 5th account anyway). But if the hacker uses my account's reputation to evade spam filters, that becomes an issue for HN.

Most reputation scores are ephemeral, to cover the case you mentioned. I have never heard of a website that gives old accounts free passes to do whatever they way. They may have fewer restrictions initially, but if abuse is detected, they will still ban the account.

Your comment makes me wonder...what is HN's spam volume?

I never see any.

I read the /new queue a lot and flag a lot of spam. There’s probably dozens of us.

Thanks.

HN audience is much more likely to use complex passwords, that are not reused elsewhere.

So the overall security level is probably still higher than elsewhere with 2FA, etc.

I have data that says otherwise.

Maybe a publishing address is locked to a sender address after the first post, so you'd need to also hijack the sender account

> Q: How do I post links or images?

> A: Write or copy a link to a website or an image into the email subject line and send it to your secret Daft Social email address.

I'm not sure I fully agree with the "simplification and reduction" premise if the only way I can get an image onto Daft Social is if I host it elsewhere first.

So if I'm reading this right, I would snap a photo on my phone, host the image somewhere, then send the URL to that image in an email. That doesn't sound overly simple.

Seems like you could upload to Dropbox and use a shareable link from your phone, no?

I love the technical aesthetic of this, but is there a "network" part of it at all? If not, I think I'd rather just self-host something similar and get the same experience without the risk of the service holding all my posts dying or trying to invasively monetize later.

Love it. I had a similar post-by-email idea for microblogging a while back: https://www.weejur.com .

Generally love to see services that integrate with email.

Rather different (less daft?), but also working via email: https://delta.chat/

Reminds me of telegra.ph which requires no email, no login and not much else (even content is optional).

[0] https://telegra.ph/

So is there just the one feed? I mean how do you browse what’s posted? You need to know exactly which account you want to follow?

Why not mailing lists at this point?

hard to monetize

It looks like Usenet

Shouldn't an “Anti-Social” social network, however minimal, be NO Social Networks?

Even more extreme.

'Antisocial' means against others. "Antagonistic, hostile, or unfriendly toward others; menacing"

'Asocial' means reclusive or unwilling to be social, but isn't necessarily antagonistic

This is the problem for sure.

I hate social media and I am someone who this site is directed at. What I like about HN is the interaction but no "followers". Of course, people want their thoughts to not be disliked but it is not a childish, high school popularity contest that if you get popular enough, you get paid for being popular.

A network without nodes and edges isn't a network.

Myspace also didn't brand itself as "super internet forum" or something like that. If you really do something different to interest people who hate social media, it will need to have no resemblance to social media.

I was able to create an account.

Does Daft have a feed where you can see who else is posting?

Super cool. Reading the subject-line-only requirement, I love it, but the nerd in me is like, "just only accept the text/plain MIME-type!". But, yeah either way very cool B)

The problem with this is that email has no negotiation. So you then need to teach users how to configure their email client to compose in plain text. Otherwise users will be confused when their message renders differently after sending and from how it appears in their outbox. (IIUC most clients will generate a text/plain message, but this isn't very visible to users).

By using the subject line the composer is already forced into plain text and so the user will get a more accurate "preview" of how the final post will look.

Yeah I mean I remember some article from long ago where it was explaining how hard it is to actually get most MUAs to not send text/html. I think they all send both because only sending one or the other gets you marked as spam.

> The problem with this is that email has no negotiation.

Well, you can bounce stuff. But, yeah I agree it's the correct product decision to not wander down the MUA rabbit hole. Like I said it's just the (email) nerd in me can't let it go haha.

I could see this being useful for a community-based website where it could be embedded into a page on the site (like an iframe), so many 'admins' could provide updates.

It seems that you could do this via their RSS feeds. There lots of RSS "widgets" that can be embedded onto your page.

Nice idea, tks

New signups are currently not possible due to overcapacity.

I call bull*hit. Faking popularity to generate interest. Old tricks.

New batch of Daft Social accounts will be available Friday 26th. https://daftsocial.com/daftsocial/?id=376

I was able to create an account just now

https://daftsocial.com/meowtimemania/

I was just able to sign up. Maybe try again.

I was also able to signup

A lot of people are focusing on the feeds etc, but I think the genius of this is that no-one can start a conversation with anybody else.

That's so plain, it's actually genius

I came here to say that I think both Posterous and Tumblr used to have this same feature. Well, it was just one of the multiple ways of publishing content back then, as opposed to being the way for this minimalist one....

Looks like Tumblr removed it [1]

Links to some Posterous articles about the feature [2]

[1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16420/post-to-tu...

[2] https://www.guidingtech.com/1525/how-to-use-posterous-quickl...

What's old is new again.

Posterous was peak blogging and content sharing for me, btw.

I think the service got hugged by HN

> Q: Does Daft Social support RSS?

> A: Yes, just add an username to https://daftsocial.com/rss?feed= to get the RSS feed.

This could really benefit from auto-discovery. Asking users to find the FAQ then construct a URL is not a very effective measure.

The auto-discovery TL;DR is if you put a link tag like the following onto a user's pages then you can subscribe to the feed just by putting any of their articles into your feed reader. This may also help SEO as Google and other search engines will discover and watch the feed.

    <link rel=alternate title="{username}" type=application/atom+xml href="/rss/?feed={username}">

I wrote a bit more detail about auto-discovery here: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#disc...

I'm pretty sure that this is intentional. The site's called Daft Social for a reason. There isn't even a link back to the homepage from a given user page and there's no way to find users unless they post their profile link somewhere. Maybe that philosophy will change, but personally I really like just how brutally minimalist the site is. The site was created by Pascal Deville, who's also behind https://brutalistwebsites.com/

Great, just implemented auto discovery links into the userpages. Go check out: e.g. https://daftsocial.com/daftsocial/

Nice, works perfectly. If I put that URL into my reader it now finds the feed automatically.

I really like this idea and hope it somewhat catches on.

I would like a self-hosted version! Does it exist?

In terms of publishing by email … HEY by 37 Signals has a feature where each user has world.hey.com/username blogs based on emails from username@hey.com sent to world@hey.com … very easy low friction publishing. This has subscriptions & RSS built in and you can import subscribers.

Details: https://www.hey.com/world/

For example: https://world.hey.com/jason

Couldn't sign up but like the concept

I’m kinda feeling it

how do you subscribe to posts?

It seems like you're supposed to use the RSS feature.

I doubt this will go anywhere, but I still enjoyed reading it. The really clever part for me is the way it uses email to do most of the work. In particular:

> Q: What if I lose my secret Daft Social email address?

> A: If you already sent posts, you should find it in the sent emails folder.

Brilliant.

In the past, Posterous was a blogging service that was powered by email, and I loved it. (You could blog using the email body and attached photos were also posted, so Daft Social without the "minimalist" part.)

Sadly, it was acquired by Twitter and then shut down.

I like that relying on the standard email protocols means you don't need an extra client to post. I wish more services could be powered by email - it is already so old, yet still underestiated as a protocol.

PS 1: Now someone just needs to give me back my BlackBerry...

PS 2: It's great they also support another standard, RSS. Two features that I would like to see are: (a) subscribe to these RSS feeds as email (for symmetry, so I can read all in my email client if I want to) and (b) two-way interoperability with Mastodon.

PS 3: I can see others have pointed out their liking of Posterious below already, so this feature should have a future in some form or another!

The Posterous founders started Posthaven after Posterous shut down, and Posthaven – by all appearances essentially a Posterous clone – is still going (and promises at least for now to stay that way): https://www.posthaven.com/features

One of those cofounders is probably familiar to YC nerds: https://blog.garrytan.com/about-me

I think it would be extra-clever to generate a contact card for the user after sign up. Then they can just import it into their address book.

...of course this relies on the user having vCard set up to open with the address book that they actually use. And it is surprising how broken most user's setups are.

Sort of a cut down mailing lists

> Q: How can I delete my Daft Social account? > A: Write or copy #deletedaftsocial into the email subject line > and send it to your secret Daft Social email address. Your > account will be permanently deleted immediately. Please note: > deleted accounts cannot be restored.

Yep. That sounds robust. Ship it!

Bulletproof! What could possibly go wrong with this concept?

how to monetize?

There's a store selling swag (A hat and a floppy with the source to the site - coming soon!?)

How about each time you post it replies with an advertisement? (although that would just increase costs...)

lol somehow I hope you forgot the sarcasm

I was just wondering if Daft Social was going to sustain itself through user monetization (sales, ads, donations, etc), it's totally cool if its based on some other mechanism. Just curious.

Seems like Usenet ..

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