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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

- i see a 100 social networks advertised daily on reddit, HN etc

- the biggest challenge you are facing is overcoming the double network effect

- in order for any of em to take off, you need to get me and my friends and their friends and so on

- one way to do this is to start a social network only for a small niche. could be anything. startups only! designers only etc and scale it up one category at a time to let the network effects come into the picture

- that is how you build a social media with 1M+ users

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I actually strongly disagree with this. This is how many social media sites have failed.

I don't know if alternative social media can ever scale as large as Reddit. Tildes.net and Lemmy both have similar activity to Hacker News and I'd consider them both "successful."

The truth is that Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc are not websites used to drive connections between human beings; they're media machines meant to create ad distribution channels. And that's what users want.

When someone uses Instagram, they don't want to see their friends vacation photos - they want to see Cardi Bs latest post. Meta attaches ads to that interaction and that's how they drive revenue.

When someone uses Reddit, they aren't seeing what their neighbor has to say - they're consuming a long flowing rage bait story or a web comic. Sure, there are smaller, niche communities but that isn't the bulk of the site traffic.

And, honestly, content is addictive. I'm personally not on Reddit to make friends or deepen my connection with other humans. I'm there to scroll through memes and cat pictures.

I think that smaller social media sites fail because they don't emphasize media generation and distribution. That reframing still presents difficult problems to solve but I feel like that simple perspective pivot helps with growth. Like, if you wanted to take the "OG" Reddit approach to bootstrapping a social media site you could just programatically generate massive amounts of fake content. Rage bait stories, product placement, etc. Just firehose as much media to drive engagement until you get actual human beings to take part.

That is is growth is what you want. It's arguable whether hyperscaled social media platforms actually make society better or individuals happier.

I think "want" is a strong word here. The way I have been explaining this to my friends is that back in the day, you had a phone to call your friends and a TV to find out the news. But what if your phone was your TV and your TV was your phone? This is what present day social media is.

I think most social media/networks now are terrible for keeping in touch with people we want to hear from. I was listening to a podcast with the musician Zedd and he mentioned that in the golden days of Facebook, he could post that he was doing a show in Toronto (or any city) and every person in Toronto who followed the Zedd Facebook page would come see him. Nowadays. he could do a post about being in Toronto and his Toronto fans will be like, "wait, why didn't I know you were in Toronto? I totally would've gone!"

Ironically, I've been enjoying IG now because I have PIECES as my place to share memories. I went to Coachella and magically IG started recommending me a ton of cool Coachella content. I open my IG now and it's a ton of World Cup content. Last month it was all Knicks content. Yet when I posted about PIECES on my Facebook, neither my aunts, uncles, or cousins saw that their family member created something he was proud of. I reached out by DM to tell them about it.

This is what happens when social platforms get to use ad revenue to fund their moon shots. All they have to do is turn on more ads to get the needed capital to fund their AI and -verse bets. As another user pointed out, The Social Contract we published isn't foolproof as a basis to assure our members that PIECES will be any different than incumbent social networks. But it's certainly a start.

Yeah, I apologize for how restrictive "want" is - I'm not sure what the appropriate word is in this context. It's more that content engagement is what drives web traffic regardless of whether or not users express desire for human connection. The social part of social media doesn't drive website expansion - content does. We love it. Yum, yum, yum.

I think if you sit a lot of people down and ask them "would you rather have cat videos or the potential to meet new friends (or maintain connections with old ones)" and people will say the want the latter but reward platforms that give them the former.

Old Facebook was maybe closer to the ideal of connecting people but Meta realized that it just doesn't drive ad revenue or engagement so they refactored it to better suit ad delivery streams and put more effort into Instagram (because it's better suited for that type of revenue model).

Any particular ones that actually had a nice design or seemed well made?

https://flipso.com is a small boutique site.

It's pretty late tonight and thankfully HN has re-front paged this to my surprise so I'll just talk openly.

The playbook that you lay out is basically the playbook every social network has come up with... and where are we now in 2026? Has that playbook produced anything good?

The niche social networks don't work and will never grow beyond their niches. Everyone is trying to start the niche thing, but ultimately, photographers want to be around non-photographers, animators want to be around non-animators, etc.,. Historically this was solved by people being on the incumbent platforms like IG/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, with niche networks to fill those specialized needs in. But I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks and there will be a vacuum with new platforms vying to fill the space. These new platforms will have their own takes on what makes a good social network. PIECES is me throwing in my hat.

I built PIECES first and foremost for myself. I had a xanga that I loved, multiple tumblrs that I still reference, an insta to talk to my friends, finstas that I still sometimes lurk on, a Substack, and a Twitter that I just re-started posting in, but at this point nothing really compares to PIECES. The most analogous is tumblr but that too became a niche platform that has been abandoned. PIECES has been great for me because it's a place I can express myself without getting caught in some other company's algo while also being able to share exclusively with my friends.

I can write more but I'll finish with this. It's July 2026 and I declare that PIECES is here to stay. There is no world where I write on the home page, "Hey everyone, it's with a heavy heart that I have to tell everyone that PIECES is closing..." I've been on the internet for 28 years now. PIECES is good. It's going to be slow growth because I refuse to build in any type of addictive/gamified functionality or make false promises or w/e but as the exodus away from incumbent social media takes place, PIECES will be one of the platforms there that promises something different.

But we'll see and I'll return back to this post in July 2030. I don't think I'll be eating my words though.

> I guarantee you that in the next five years there's going to be a huge exodus out of the incumbent networks

Are you willing to change your mind on this?

What evidence do you have this will happen?

It does seem that social networks can have some generational stickiness. Wrestling my family away from Facebook feels like a lost cause. But younger relatives are more active on Instagram and some other options.

But I don't see what would trigger an exodus given that everything you and I might not like about the existing social media incumbents hasn't been enough to drive people away en masse so far.

You gotta take risks sometimes. The opportunity cost of me working on this vs other projects is my risk.

To be more precise about what I mean by exodus, I don't think that instagram is going away but I do think its utility as the de facto social network to keep in touch with friends is at risk. I know a lot of people who are quitting and I know a lot of people who don't really care for it but are on it because everyone else is on it. I'll probably have an IG still in 5 years but I see a world where I don't use it much.

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