Ask HN: How would you launch a privacy-first, Instagram-like social network? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you launch a privacy-first, Instagram-like social network?

55 pointsthunderstruck116 comments

Hey HN,

I'm planning to launch a privacy-first social network in 2025, inspired by platforms like Instagram. Success for this platform means reaching a sustainable level of recurring revenue, without relying on an ad network.

One challenge I'm anticipating is attracting celebrities and influencers who are already established on Instagram and TikTok. How could I persuade them to use this platform as well? For those with experience or insights, how would you approach building and promoting such a network to reach this revenue goal?

Thanks for any advice or ideas!

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> by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. - Paul Graham [1]

I think this proposal points at an interesting issue that I see crop up often on sites like HN. It goes (I think) like this: 1) "I care deeply about what I perceive to be a problem." 2) Extrapolates onto some large critical mass of people, 3) That critical mass of people does not actually agree with the problem statement in any way, 4) Build a solution, never gets meaningful traction, misdiagnoses the root cause of the failure.

I'm not saying this to dump on this idea. Rather, I think it is a meaningful bias that all humans are vulnerable too. But I do think that filter bubbles amplify whatever this bias is to a powerful degree. If you are surrounded by people who are obsessed with privacy, it seems like everyone is inflamed by the economic model of social networks. But, outside the small filter bubble, most other people don't care at all or actually think its a great model.

Having said all of that, maybe a way to test whether you are experiencing this bias is to interview or collect information from as close to a random sample of social media users as possible. The more random the better. If you find yourself talking to people in SF/Seattle or people in the tech industry, that's a sure sign you have a bad sample. When you talk to them, don't ask leading questions that will bias them. Try to understand what their unbiased views on the problems (if any) are with social networks. Maybe you ask them what their best friend thinks so as to try to sidestep preference falsification. If you discover a consistent problem, maybe you're onto something. But then, you're still up against a world saturated with social networks, and convincing people to pay for something they get for free will be very, very hard. I think, ultimately, the only way you'll discover whether the problems you may have found are really important or not is if you can convince anyone to pay you. I suspect it will be a Sisyphean endeavor.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I'm going to just add a question to this - if you assume that privacy is a concern that a large enough base of users have that your service can generate enough revenue to support it - why do you think that celebrities and the like are in the group of people who would care about privacy, the main selling point of your service.

It seems to me that, by definition, it is the quality they care least about as they already do not have it anywhere else in their life. And you want them to be attracting more users by being "the celebrity" which is a person without privacy.

Pretty sure listening to PG over your gut (or worse, your brain) is a more common startup mistake than that one.

Tiktok solves a problem no one has, and look at it go.

Not a dig on PG or Tiktok. It's just such an outlier I don't really understand it, and to me it breaks the framework.

TikTok clearly solves two problems that fit squarely within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

1. For content consumers: “I’m bored, and want to be entertained with minimal effort.”

2. For content creators: “I’m externally motivated and need the self validation that comes from attention and praise.”

Solutions to these problems have been sold for hundreds of years and trillions of dollars in profit. TikTok is the latest and possibly most efficient iteration on solving them.

Youtube already solved 1, 2.

What TikTok really solves is mixing a song from its library into your video and applying a cool visual effect.

No one with a youtube account is gonna download a separate video editing app and build a production pipeline at day 1 (plus copyright issues). It’s a stopper that separates viewers from creators. TikTok made creation trivial and that itself created an enormous funnel. It could afford to not even be a “short” video platform, that’s just a coincidence.

> What TikTok really solves is mixing a song from its library into your video and applying a cool visual effect.

That's what Musically solved 10 years ago, but it's not what TikTok is solving today. At this point, that feature is no different than the ability to add stickers to your Instagram post.

...which is not to undersell the achievement of Musically/TikTok. I specifically remember back in 2015, discussing whether such an app would even be a success, and deciding that nobody would ever film themselves karoke'ing to a song... but here we are.

right, and you don't get to any of these problems by "talking to the customer" b/c they'll never just say "I’m bored, and want to be entertained with minimal effort" — or at least, that's kind of obvious

it breaks the framework bc to make a successful company like tiktok, you'd build "obvious" apps like this, and wouldn't really need to ask customers what their needs are

Self-validation is Herzberg (motivator, not hygiene).

Maslow hierarchy of needs is: Physical, Safety, Social, Esteem, Self-actualisation.

I'd put the TikTok validators under safety/esteem, but thanks for the reference to Herzberg, I hadn't seen that before.

I disagree… sort of. TikTok found a better way to deliver video content. The problem was, video content and its associated social data, sucked. Most of us just didn’t realize it. But TikTok did. And they were right. It’s sort of like how you didn’t realize that horses sucked for transportation until you saw car. A flawed metaphor, but you get my point. I think a distinction here is that video, in the TikTok, is the product. Privacy is not. You aren’t entertained or informed by privacy. It’s like insurance. You only value it when something bad happens. And if your business model is less good entertainment/information, but with some insurance on the side, seems like a very tough pitch.

Now, of course, that points out a flaw in my original post. Very hard to get people to articulate something of which they are unaware.

They also didn't come first. Vine was a very popular platform that seemingly shut down out of the blue (at the height of it's popularity). There was no real replacement for a long time after that. Tiktok first started out as Musically, allowing people to create mainly dance and lipsync videos. Only later they rebranded to Tiktok and pivoted to general purpose video content.

The point is, even tiktok didn't just get right and had to pivot and maybe that is key. So to the op I would say: try your idea but just be very very spontaneous and flexible to change it quickly if it doesn't work.

yeah exactly, no amounts of user research would lead to "people want a platform like tiktok"

With the possible exception of Vine's 200 million users.

Why would you build it?

That isn't being snarky, it is the question you need to answer. Why would people join it? What problem are you solving for them? Why are celebrities and influencers on those platforms to begin with?

When you can detail out those answers, those answers tell you what you need to do to launch. You have to match the table stakes of existing platforms, which means you need to know not only what those are, but why they are important to the userbase.

I suspect you'll find that your drive for privacy-first is going to be well-received in theory, but not a match for why people join such platforms. But you'll need to do the research to figure out such things.

Theres a HN post not very old (less than a year. Maybe less than 6mo.) of this concept... it was even a "public benefit corporation," but it quickly went off the rails into a bad imitation.

The reality is- real users won't pay for these services and the only entities that will pay.

Well, they're paying for ads with the knockoffs because (ironically) instagram et. al. won't run their ads because they're "bad for users."

I would shift a lot of charitable giving to a non-profit privacy first site that is Facebook or Instagram which is focused only on sharing photos and text with friends, family and my local community. That excludes news, celebs, influencers, et al

I can't imagine that there wouldn't be enough people like me to support an inexpensive (compared to FB, etc) endeavor like this. If it still isn't enough, have local only ads that are not tracked and are served right from the site (and give users control over the type of ads they want to see). I wouldn't mind a couple unobtrusive ads for local restaurants, services, etc.

Maybe I am underestimating the cost here, but I also think that HN generally underestimates the social angst over the massive invasion of privacy by corporations. 90% of my non-tech friends and family have asked me how bad it is and how they can avoid it. Of course I just shrug and say you can't...

p.s. can you please link the HN discussion you referenced?

Thanks for your comment! Honestly, I didn’t expect anyone to respond to such a vague post.

The reason I’d build this platform is to help people connect without the distractions of sponsored content or random memes. I stopped using Facebook about seven years ago because I wanted a space where I could simply engage with the people in my network and their thoughts. AdBlock helped for a while, but eventually, my feed filled with random posts from pages I hadn’t followed. I understand that Facebook’s goal is to keep users engaged, but the constant noise led me to switch to Instagram. Unfortunately, Instagram went down a similar path, especially with the rise of Reels.

Now, I mainly use WhatsApp groups to stay connected.

Why are celebrities and influencers on those platforms to begin with?

I considered a model where users could pay to access celebrity posts. It sounds similar to OnlyFans, but I see it as a potential revenue stream or, alternatively, a way to support a fixed monthly fee in exchange for privacy.

It seems like you are going through the same thought process that I went through and led me to work on https://communick.com. Save yourself a world of pain and find something else to work on.

The amount of people who really value their privacy and are willing to pay to avoid getting their data exploited is too low to matter in the context of a social network. I've tried different pricing, I've tried different extra features, I've tried going upmarket, but I never got a critical mass of people to make the whole endeavor sustainable.

On the content creator side, it's even worse. Creators will always prefer to work on platforms that offer them the widest reach. So even when you have privacy enthusiasts or creators who know all the issues from YouTube/Reddit/Instagram, they will still keep a channel there out of fear of not keeping up with "the algorithm".

If you really insist on going mad like me and believe that this is a worthy cause to work on, look at the existing social networks that are based on open source and open standards, like PixelFed [0] and Vernissage [1].

[0] https://pixelfed.org

[1] https://vernissage.photos

I agree. Millions of people will never ever pay for something they can have for free with instagram. And because the adoption rate will be slow they will have to use instagram anyway in the meantime to find the content and people there which will kill your adoption rate unless you invest in huge amounts in marketing.

You can try to built something new but people who value privacy are not in the masses. Most people don’t care at all unless in immediate threat (like usurpation or stealing money).

There is already so many platforms that do just that and we don’t know about them because the problem also lies there. It’s hard to get known in the internet now with all the services that exists and distractions there is.

For example I haven’t been in the AppStore in years, only searching for something specific. Never ever for discovery of what is in there. Many, many people are like that as well which makes them hard to reach.

> I considered a model where users could pay to access celebrity posts.

Why would celebrities be on your platform if you lock the audience away from them?

Also, celebrities with public accounts are ultimately just doing advertising for themselves (and whoever pays them), so you haven't actually escaped the realm of ad-funded networks.

When you "own" a "social network" the fundamental asset you have is the audience, and only people with something to advertise are willing to pay for access to it.

For what it's worth, I agree with the other comments that you should drop this idea and pivot. Not nearly enough people care about this.

My advice is to run some other thing and just - as a gift to yourself and a somewhat silent gift to the world - don't monetize it via advertising or selling user data.

Don't make that one of the selling points of the platform: just do it because you think it'll create a better product that more closely aligns with what provides a good experience for users, and because you think it's more ethical. It's very likely not going to be a significant draw for the product in itself. You can mention it as a bullet point in marketing, but don't make it "the thing".

You answered "why I'm building it" but not "why you should join".

Three observations: "The OC Problem", "Useful for n==1", and "Build an Internal Internet".

1) OC, aka: Original Content. Most sharing has trended towards reposts, memes, etc. That is the toxic cancer that has spread throughout most "social" networks. Somebody finds a funny meme, or ridiculous tornado picking up a car while someone dances a jig in front of it, and that drowns out "real" pictures of peoples kids or cats or whatever.

2) Useful for n==1. I believe it was an interview with the founder of del.ico.us (one of the OG bookmarking sites) who said "if you want users, you have to make something that's useful for _just that one user_, and if more users use it, then it gets better". It was shockingly insightful! He made delicious where I was motivated (for myself) to save bookmarks / links. If other people saved the same link, a counter went up (social proof?). I (and others) could explore shared tags (eg: `#tech`, `#javascript`, whatever), and that had an exponential utility based on number of users, BUT BOUNDED IN THE n==1 CASE!

3) Build an Internal Internet: I had a blog once upon a time (still do, and still nobody reads it ;-), and then twitter came along. Of course it grabbed my attention, of course I tweeted to be cool like the cool kids. Then I got upset with myself: "I like this micro-blogging thing, but it's taking away from my own blogging!" So I made `tweet.sh`, which did `echo "$1" > "~/blog/entries/tweets/$DATE-tweet.md"` and then styled it appropriately.

Putting it all together, build an INTERNAL instagram to help people back up, organize, showcase their photos (n==1). SOCIALIZE it via cooperating / federated instances (exponential utility). Allow tagging/repost/non-OC suppression (and SOCIALIZE that... eg: allow people to anti-socialize reposts).

For monetizing? Good luck. It's got to be better than iPhotos.

> Why would you build it?

he already told you, revenue goals.

Privacy first, social network without ads means users pay. Why would any users pay for this? The vast majority of people on social networks do not care about privacy. They care so little that their accounts are frequently hacked because they are using the same password everywhere. These people also aren't going to pay for something they already get for free.

Your motivation is purely revenue. What would the user's motivation be to add yet another thing they have to keep up to date on? What can any users you do get use to convince their circle of humans to also join?

Without massive user counts or revenue share with celebs or influencers what incentive would they have to join?

How are you going to pay for bandwidth and storage of videos/images with no revenue? Like do you have a nest egg/run rate saved to fund this social network for a year or two?

Apple photos is my privacy first social network. I have "shared albums" with my families, different friend/hobby groups. There is an activity feed so whenever someone shares a photo I get a notification, can like like, comment. It just has the basic features and works really well. Here's the thing, I pay $40 a month for the icloud bundle. So technically they've monetized it already. I've always wondered if others use it similarly...

Exactly. Privacy-first networks (like OP using WhatsApp) already exist and are in use and are $FREE.

I would not say WhatsApp as privacy-first network, but otherwise I agree.

For me it's just plain old texting group chats, which compared to texting in the old days, is not so bad with RCS messaging. It's free (with cellphone plan), no ads, chronological timeline, private, can send dumb videos and memes all day long while connected to WiFi.

I think this is the reason why "social media" seems so dead now. People stopped posting publicly (for obvious reasons) and almost all of the "social" web is in private group chats. People don't want their life broadcast permanently and prolifically anymore, and they want to share it with just a subset of their friends. The only people left posting to the "public web" are attention seekers, scammers, influencers, people that don't know any better.

Do you mind if I ask how this works

1) with people who aren't on icloud/iOS?

2) publishing-wise? Like are they getting 'feeds' in their imessage apps or...?

1) it doesn't work outside of iOS/macOS really. 2) it's an app on both platforms with it's own communication protocol

You can use Google Photos similarly and it's cross platform. Not sure about commments tho

Line and Facebook also have "private" social media feeds. By private I mean only people you approve can view. No idea how mined they are for data for ads

AFAIK, it's IOS only. The one android user in my family switched to iphone after feeling left out for a year. Other groups also are all iphone

The feed is actually in the Apple Photo app. There is a section for "shared albums" and a link to "activity" that has a feed UI.

I've always thought if the shared album was tied directly to the group message that would be nirvana, but I don't believe that's a possibility.

Are you able to share photos with others who don't have iCloud accounts, or do you only associate with fellow Apple users?

I do this as well! There is a link that android users can use to view, not sure about upload. My feature wish is that you could associate a shared album with a group message and then it's all I'd ever need. Also not sure you've run into this, but we recently hit the 5K pic shared album limit and had to create a new album.

You can via a public link

There exists a federated Instagram clone in case you want to look at previous attempts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed

How is this private?

As far as I'm aware, federation tends to be opposite to privacy because there can't be centralized control of access. e.g. none of the federated social media support private profiles but Instagram does, so Instagram is actually more private than most of these.

"Privacy" here means "no big tech will be tracking me and trying to shove ads down users' throats", not that the published content is protected from public view.

I genuinely don't understand this perspective of privacy. I think it's a dishonest use of the word.

For example, in Bluesky, which users you blocked is public information.

To me, this sounds like a bigger "privacy" issue than "the ad company figured out you're a man who lives near the beach so you get ads about surfboards."

Privacy is about control of your data. Control requires centralization. How come people think decentralization is good for privacy? This is a very narrow definition of privacy that doesn't matter for most people.

If you have a better word for "Designed in a way that attempts to protect you from Surveillance Capitalism", I am all ears.

> Control requires centralization.

How, exactly? What control do you have over data you handed to Facebook?

You don't have control over your data, but Facebook does at least, so long as you trust Facebook, it's fine.

Keyword: TRUST.

Decentralization is often paired with trustlessness, and that's where things fall apart. The average person isn't a paranoid cybersecurity expert. They will trust on services evem if those services' whole mantra is "trust nobody, even us."

In essence, with Facebook, you are knowingly transferring control of your data to Facebook. With decentralized social media, you completely let go of any control and there is nobody to take over it.

Most people won't understand that nobody will have control of the data. They'll think they can just ask Mastodon staff to delete a post from an instance across the globe after they pressed the delete button and for some reason it didn't completely disappear from every instance.

I'm afraid all the privacy problems of decentralization didn't manifest yet because almost nobody is using it to begin with. If more people start to use it, it's going to be obvious we're only trading one privacy violation by another.

> You don't have control over your data. (...) as long as you trust Facebook

You just lost any right to complain over people misusing words.

> With decentralized social media, you completely let go of any control and there is nobody to take over it.

Quite the opposite. Decentralized social media allows you to be in control if you so desire.

> I'm afraid all the privacy problems of decentralization .

You were arguing that centralized systems are inherently more private. This is absolute and utter bullshit.

Is the "real privacy" story weak on federated social media? Yes, currently it is. But to have a "real private" communication platform, control MUST be given to the end user, which in effect means that the system MUST be decentralized.

The iOS app has been in testflight forever and the author moved his focus to Loops. I, for one, don't have any faith in Pixelfed or its offshoots.

It's called a private group chat, and it exists everywhere. No "recommendations," no ads, no moderation, no randos butting in trying to derail conversations, just shared social norms among the participants. It's not something you can scale or monetize, and that's exactly why it's the perfect social network.

I wouldn't bother. Nobody really cares about privacy-first. The HN audience is one that you might expect to care strongly about privacy, and yet even here many still prefer to use the Android/Google ecosystem because it's more customizable and Not Apple, over the highly private Apple ecosystem. Privacy just isn't that many people's first concern.

Ello was an attempt at something like this, but it shut down last year

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

Pixelfed is already what you are looking for. You could contribute yourself, fork it, or just use it in your server.

What I don't see often, and I think it was a neat idea is a copy of Path. A social network for a very very small set of people to share their things. I think path was like 2 members.

I imagine that just a whatsapp/telegram conversation chat is more than enough for this case tho.

As a new service, I think you'll struggle to attract celebrities and influencers. You'd need to have some really compelling reason for them to use the service, and the only compelling reason they'd care about is audience size, which you won't have.

If I were attempting this, I'd design and aim the network for a niche audience of some sort and once that's established, begin expanding to wider audiences.

Instagram for Furries!

Most people don't care about privacy, and those who care – like a lot of users of this website – care too much to trust you.

I don't think starting with celebrities and hoping you instantly become Instagram is the move. Do something different, and better, than Instagram that some group of people will want... privacy isn't it. You prioritize privacy, I'd even say you should, but that should be an added benefit, not your primary sales pitch. As much as I like it, the public at large has collectively responded that they don't care enough. So what novel thing will you have that will draw in the kids and make it cool? And remember that no matter how good of thing you make, there is a large element of luck in becoming an Instagram. The second you describe your product by saying it's like another existing and popular product, you're already at a disadvantage. There is no shortage of instagram clones.

I wouldn't.

I tried and tried to sell stuff to "privacy freaks". Turns out that type doesn't like paying for closed-source services and generally will turn their nose up to subscriptions. I am one of these "privacy freaks", love them, but they are honestly probably the hardest people to sell to.

I stopped trying to market to them. It is also a nightmare to try to reach that audience too because they almost always have ad blockers and any space they hang out in very quickly sniff out ads or outright ban talking about products they created.

Furthermore, privacy people tend to be technical themselves so they would prefer to build a solution specific to them rather than use someone else's solution unless it is difficult or requires specialized knowledge they don't care to acquire.

I'd be more worried about how you're going to pay for it than anything else. If the revenue is not from ads how are you funding it? Especially if it becomes a hit.

I think you'll have a hard time convincing most users to pay for something they can get for "free" elsewhere.

Path??? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

> One challenge I'm anticipating is attracting celebrities and influencers who are already established on Instagram and TikTok.

I would rather like to see the solving the problem of not attracting any celebrities or influencers , or companies and just getting normal people for social connections, like Facebook was originally. This is the hard problem.

Money and fame usually destroys the platform in the end, as it aims for endless competition and rule breaking.

That’s an interesting perspective—thanks for sharing it! My thought was that having celebrities and influencers could help generate revenue in some way.

Curiously enough, influencers' pages are actually ad pages, because some of them get paid to promote products. But of course they won't be paying you. Celebs might also promote their latest movie/song/coffee machine/perfume cooperation. Are these ads?

So the "no ads" model falls apart there.

I wonder if a non-targetted ad could be considered privacy-preserving. Then of course I thought but I'd want some targetting, e.g. by country, because for example having an ad for a spa in Helsinki would be quite irrelevant for users in Bangladesh... then how about by age-range, or gender, etc.

At least I'd welcome when the app transparently says e.g. "You're seeing this ad because it's targetting males over 40 with the geo-ip location of Europe".

Yes - I saw that this is precisely what was on your mind when you asked about it. Typically celebrities and influencers would pull other people too into platform (well, it could be also visible in revenue).

These are some of the reasons why it is a hard problem.

I think you are worried about the wrong problem. Forget about the influencers for a moment - what will your source of revenue be if you don't have an ad network?

Users are the content on social networks. If you charge them to join, you will have fewer users and less content on the network. That reduces the value so you can't charge as much, and the cycle continues.

This is a remarkably consistent failure of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative space. In the time I've been alive we've gone from bulky PC and monitor combos that took up entire desks to light-as-a-feather laptops that pack thousands of times more power and storage space, we've gone from me working for a day to figure out a CD burner to get all of my data on my computer backed up to a disk (about 550 MB) to today, when I regularly as part of my creative side of my role, toss around files over a network that are as much if not larger than that, and it's barely an inconvenience. Yet the topic of "how do we monetize social media" utterly brings an otherwise brilliant community to a shrug.

I don't think you're entirely wrong, mind you, ad supported services are the default and any competing service that requires payment operates at a disadvantage, which is why I continuously come back to the idea that surveillance capitalism needs to be regulated. On a recent episode of Better Offline, the host interviewed an economist who has suggested a steep tax on digital ad spend, specifically to open the space to alternatives away from people giving away their privacy. I think that's a great idea, not as extreme as my ideal solution which would be the utter dismantling of surveillance capitalism entirely, but still.

The problem is money is literally the power here, as it is in most places, and the users are contributing none, and the advertisers are contributing all, and this is basically the source of every cancerous, inhumane and exploitative problem you can think of in social media. And you are 100% correct: a paid instagram will never succeed as long as instagram remains free. Then, IMO, the logical next step is we need to make it not free, or at the very least, take up some of that profit and put it towards other ends that we can actually affect change on.

"The market" is clearly incapable of solving social media, it only has made it worse, ever, ever worse. We need something else.

> We need something else.

Have you looked into ATProto? (by Bluesky)

1. It separates the data, app, algo, and moderation into pluggable modules

2. You can build any app on top of it, all app user data ends up in the same user database (sqlite db per user)

3. They supposedly have a non-ad monetization plan, but haven't publicly announced what it is yet

As others have already stated, without either actual paying users (not the celebrities) or some form of advertising costs can become very high quite fast.

Even though you are against all forms of advertising, some really privacy oriented form of it may be acceptable by your intended users. Some thoughts:

- Users need to disclose some topics/subtopics (either broad or even very niche interests)

- The ads need to be conformant to some predefined, non-intrusive style guide: maybe black-and-white or a limited color palette and font selection. This could lead to interesting and even creative ads on the platform

- Advertisers could get anonymized click-counts for their specific categories, and maybe some other category-based info, but user data would be immediately aggregated and not used for specific targeting

- Base users would see 1/3 ads in their feeds, but some payments could reduce this to 1/5, 1/8, all the way to zero.

This approach might provide the intended privacy benefits with much less noise, but also not alienate the average user that expects social to be free of any cost.

Best of luck with you on this endeavor.

Regarding getting celebrities and influencers, you're going to have to pick from a group of people who are either highly tolerant of seeing their content next to, say, something really odious, or are already considered persona non grata. I'm certain you understand the reasons for this, so let me jump straight to my suggestions:

1. Work on a federated model a la bluesky that is censorship-proof but highly customizable so that people can form up around content they want to see and content they one (this is a very hard balance)

2. Be 'free speech friendly' and accept the fact that you may have to censor, but just be transparent about it. One of the biggest problems with censorship on the bigs is that its opaque, inconsistent, and nonsensical and hurts people who have no idea what they're doing or why it's 'inconsistent with Meta's values' or what the fuck ever.

You are opening a can of worms but its also a much-needed alternative so I wish you the best of luck.

Many commenters are telling you not to do this, but no one is answering the main question - how to launch such a network. I've actually been thinking about this idea a ton... how could you ever get a niche social media network off the ground when the incumbents are massive?

In any case, I'm working on a small project to support smaller social medias. Not trying to promote too much but it's called Soshials (soshials.com) and is basically like producthunt but for social media platforms. An additional twist is that users can actually join "cohorts" to try the new social media platforms for a month and give feedback.

I think getting feedback from real, initial users (instead of just friends/family) is a real reason why it's hard to iterate on and improve new platforms. Interested to hear if others have similar thoughts on how to actually launch a new social network.

Hopefully you make an amazing product and I’m rooting for you, but privacy is probably not a killer feature for social media.

I’d focus on finding an amazing new way to rethink how usage works and privacy can be a nice afterthought. But know this is possibly the most competitive consumer software space in existence.

Imagine you have asked a question of how to get from Vancouver, B.C. To Hudson Bay. In response you get answers like "Why?" and "Here are other people who have failed", "People have already been to Hudson Bay", "Money and Power will destroy you", "Don't take camels".

And there is your problem statement. There is vast uncertainty about how to get there, even what ways there are to get there. You have to clarify all the uncertainty and there are no a priori answers. Just start going and see what happens. There is no recipe and if there was it would probably be for something you would not like.

[Edit: I am serious, not trying to be critical or facetious. As someone who has tried similar things, there is no recipe, so if you want to do x you just start with that fact and go.]

Social networks are social advertising networks.

A privacy-first solution by its nature is unlikely to benefit from network effects. You don’t organically discover content that has to be explicitly shared with you.

So they way to do it is to already have a network or platform and then allow private photo sharing. E.g. Apple Photos built on the iOS ecosystem or if WhatsApp had a photo feed.

One idea would be to sell photo-sharing tech to a non-US messaging app that’s popular abroad like Viber or CacaoTalk or that serves some niche community. (Photo-sharing for low-bandwidth users in developing countries?) Maybe it aggregates shared photos into an ergonomic feed or something. But they could just copy that themselves; it’s hard to monetize an improved UX directly without the data/community to power it.

The concept of "privacy-first" and that of a social network like Instagram or TikTok with celebrities and influencers seem incompatible to me.

The entire point of such a social network is to be public, exposure is the point, not privacy. You want to broadcast your content to the entire world, you want recognition in terms of "likes" or for the luckiest, money, you don't go there to keep secrets.

For a privacy-first social network, usually what people want is to form smaller groups where people know each other. Think more like Discord than Instagram, or for a more privacy-focused alternative Matrix.

Alternatively, maybe take a look at OnlyFans. They are quite successful and don't depend on ad revenue, and considering what they do, I think people care about privacy.

I wouldn’t.

If you were really going to approach it, you would launch a privacy focused messaging app, which could add filters and other simple Photo and video editing tools because most people are now sharing in small message groups and not publicly for everyone to see.

I see many takes in the comments but no one seems to be addressing the fact that privacy and social are opposites of each other. I think you could state the problem better- for example sharing with the audience that you expect to share with or some better controls on who sees what. But these alone are not good enough differentiation and in theory Facebook has very fine grained privacy controls and no one bothers to set this correctly and advertisers still see more than what you set etc

It is a hairy problem but it’s hard to frame it in such a way as to make it attractive enough to the masses to switch from existing networks

I'd build it on nostr. You have no infra costs, there already exists a network, and you can build whatever kind of client (privacy oriented in your case) you want. You can also extend the schema as you propose/see fit.

Instagram is for self-promotion and/or what we could politely call "face posting". It's all about showing off and associating with real people. It's basically a personal brand platform.

Thank you for your post. I've been working on a similar concept but for super close-knit groups, think families, college friends, etc. (less than 10 people/group). I was going to incorporate some mechanisms to encourage posting since if no one posts, it'll die.

I felt like this is a problem I have. I want to hear about my friends’ lives, but no one posts on Facebook/Instagram anymore. And my feed is now constantly influencers.

However, after hearing all these comments/experiences, I will be pivoting! Thanks you for your post and saving me a headache.

This is literally Cara. Artists love the visuals of Instagram, but oppose Meta's work on AI. Privacy first would also fit that perfectly.

Cara has some problems with funding and scaling too - it was founded by a photographer who knows her aesthetics but might need some technical (and financial) help.

https://cara.app/explore

What does privacy-first mean? Don't socials already have two modes: public-post and friend-post? Celebrities are public figures, why would they want a privacy in this scenario?

By privacy-first, I mean that I won’t segment users based on their behavior for any purpose. There will be no ads on the network.

I hadn’t yet thought through specifics like “friend-post” or “public-post” modes, or whether non-users would be able to view public posts without an account.

>> segment users based on their behavior

I think you are saying you will use a chronological-feed instead of an algorithic-feed (where you sort, filter, promote to be most-relevant) to display posts.

I much prefer a chronological feed, but they don't work in reality. All current social media platforms rely on their algorithm for discovery.

Without it you may have a very large social media site on paper, but each user only interacts with a small subset which defeats the point of a social media platform. You've effectively created a group chat service that technically doesn't prevent others from joining in, it just doesn't let others find the conversation they are interested in

Many artists (and other users) would like to leave Instagram because they don't like Meta using their work and posts for AI training, but doing so is difficult because of how popular Instagram is compared to alternatives.

https://wired.me/technology/artists-are-leaving-instagram-ai...

You make a photo app where backing up your pictures online costs a small subscription fee per month. It’s only free if you only use the native client storing your media locally.

It cannot work if it’s a free service unless the entity running it is a non-profit ie a private VC funded entity will eventually sell or share your data.

To my knowledge, only Apple has made something like this but it only works best on their platform which limits it.

I worked on something very similar: a privacy-first Instagram clone built on top of Matrix. We had a prototype and some initial users.

Here's the unfortunate truth:

The challenge of overcoming the network effect is _the_ problem you're solving here. Nothing else really matters. Almost nobody will care that it's privacy-first. Asking HN to help you figure this out indicates to me that you should do something else.

Try taking foreign investment from authoritarian governments and using that money to form exclusivity contracts with influencers on your platform.

I would start simple. Build it and share it with your friends and family. If you are in a college, share it with your college. Solve the problem for your closed group first. If you can convince your group to pay, you have crossed the first step. So first degree of separation is solved.

Remember, most celebrities will be at most at a distance of six degrees of separation. So you can build up to that.

>privacy first

>social media

you don't. you just killed your only decent revenue source, and will never out compete others. Social media live and die by their users.

I suspect that the primary challenge social networks face going forward is adversarial AIs. This can take the form of spam bots: astroturfing, trolling, abuse. And of AI spies: bots that programmatically analyze and extract information from users.

I don't know what the next big social network will look like but I think the one key thing you need to solve for is authenticity.

I’ve built a social network that has an influencer -> audience model in order to not rely on advertiser revenue. Im trying to figure out the getting users but now.

I’d suggest that the answer is not how to attract celebrities but in the first instance how to attract any users. My platform is novel and interesting and even then it’s not easy.

Interesting. Please share the link to your network.

http://beastie.fi. App links in the menu. It’s likely not what you’re expecting.

What you are describing sounds an awful lot like Snapchat. I would honestly just download Snap and tour their App since they have already come up with solutions to all of these problems. They aren’t always great solutions, and snap is still mostly an ads platform for revenue, but the core product gets right to this issue.

It already exists, and it's called RSS.

RSS is very nice~ I like this tool

If I had a time machine, I’d make something where text posts are free, but need to pay for photo/video storage. Add some procedural graphics for efficient flare. The circles functionality would be helpful also.

Launch? Need a marketing budget and someone who knows how to spend it wisely. Maybe a contest as well.

Find a niche community that wants something like that, who typically have disposable income. (Photographers)

Make a privacy-first Instagram-like social network and (here's the important part) charge for it.

https://glass.photo/ is a good example.

I've had a similar idea - my thoughts would be to make a distributed p2p social network where data is held on the user's device, and the user could opt-in to selling that data to various sources.

That said, I have no idea how to even vet the feasibility of a network like that, but one can dream.

Seriously, take that energy and enthusiasm and study business. You're asking the wrong questions.

I would use discourse to build it. The feature set is incredible.

I would make it community / area of interest centric (like Reddit).

Attract deep subject matter experts for the categories.

I actually own some domains that could be perfect for this site….

Email me (charles@turnsys.com) and I can go into more detail.

If you’re passionate about this idea, launch it! Your initial costs will be on the low end. If it does grow to the point you need to worry about costs, that’s a good problem to have which you can then handle appropriately at that time.

A privacy first social media site is like a health first pastry shop.

> How could I persuade them to use this platform as well?

Without funds to pay them directly, you'll most likely need to offer them equity or some sort of commission/affiliate model.

why not offer two "plans", an advertising plan for the hordes who don't care, which you milk for revenue to support the infrastructure while you grow the privacy subscriber base? work out the tech to chinese-wall the fortune cookies on each side (cookies like browser cookies, fortune for all the money you're gonna make, and because I said chinese-wall even though they are historically japanese)

I don’t know why people keep trying to put “privacy first” and “social network” in the same sentence, it’s clear by now they are antithetical.

1. acquire lots of money 2. pay celebrities and influencers to create exclusive stuff for your platform 3. ...? 4. profit!

Having it be decentralized is more important than anything IMO.

True privacy comes from having control over your data.

No e-mail/phone number requirement. New uploaders must be vetted by moderators/quarantined. No video support. Use AI to detect if something is a meme then shadowban the post. Design must look like https://www.fotki.com/

No video support ? No meme support ?

Why would anyone bother ? I think you didn't read the request completely.

Well, I was asked what I would do, and what I would do is...

Instead of supporting videos and memes and trying to compete with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Tumblr, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit and EVEN IMGUR

I'd focus on images and then my only competitor would be Pinterest, and I wouldn't have to deal with all the complexity that comes with supporting video.

Finally someone that mentioned mastodon!

What makes it "privacy-first".

It sounds like revenue-first.

It’s an oxy, moron.

An idea like this could truly make you a multi-millionaire!*

*one minor catch is that you’ll have to start as a billionaire

You don’t.

> I'm planning to launch a privacy-first social network in 2025, inspired by platforms like Instagram

Brain dumping my thoughts in this space (actively working in it), sorry if it is disorganized.

I would start by deconstructing your problem statement more and focusing on _why_ you want to build this; be very explicit and precise about your thesis. After getting a clear and conscise articulation of your why, your thesis, go talk to people about it. Randos at the bar, the gym, your church, school. Your social network, if successful, will be used by these people. Find places to kick up conversations with strangers. Ask them what they do. Eventually they'll ask you what you do in return. Use that as an opportunity to pitch your "why" and see if they get excited.

If random people aren't getting excited, your why isn't compelling.

If you are wanting to imitate Instagram, you are building a _social media_ application not a _social networking_ application. Social networks are focused on community building (creating social connections). Social media is a variable rate reward machine (casino) that hypes up randos on the internet in an attempt to make them famous in front of other randos on the internet. Social media algorithms optimize for things like "engagement" and "view time" - is this compatible with your current thesis? If not, what changes do you need to make to the Instagram experience to make it compatible? If it is privacy first, how will you feed your algorithm?

You also need to solve the game theory of the platform. Its more than just revenue, though getting people to pay you for this is a big part. The game theory includes moderation, lawfare, personal morals, etc. How are you approaching _sharing and storing content_? Are you going to slot a server into a server rack? You'll have to pay for that of course. But you'll also have nation states and other power seeking actors knocking on your door about your thesis and asking for control/influence over that server- what are you going to tell them? How are you going to align incentives so that your thesis doesn't fail under the pressure from U.S. clandestine operations? Will you be compelled by law at some point to abandon your thesis? Will you be compelled by your own morals to abandon it? How will you handle that?

When it comes to infrastructure costs, the more you personally host the more revenue you'll need to keep the thing afloat. It doesn't matter if you are a non-profit, a public benefit non-profit, a for-profit entity... someone will have to give you money to pay for storing and serving all that content.

The more you can rely on the infrastructure provided by your users (their internet, their compute, their storage) - the cheaper it will be to run. The more you rely on your users infrastructure, the fewer centralized points of control their will be for power seeking actors to try to capture.

This is getting rambley, sorry. I've spoken on this before (in the context of building peer-to-peer social networking experiences) if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeZgCy3ub6M

Hi, I built one of these a few years ago. Poured my life savings into it.

You’re about to get a very tough education on who uses social networks and why they do it. It has nothing to do with privacy. Would urge you to not bother.

Some evidence of why not to bother:

1. Tar Pit Ideas: https://youtu.be/GMIawSAygO4

2. Tar Pit Ideas, the Sequel: https://youtu.be/GU9iT7MW0rs

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