jstrafy

That's really interesting - do you use anything like Meetup.com or are you on any discord/slack servers?

There is a cool app that I've been using called Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/), it links you with another person one time a week. Might be worth trying if you haven't already. Otherwise I'd really been keen to chat on how we could solve that problem!

Completely true about the people discovery apps (probably why most of them end up as dating or a hybrid dating/networking), so in my experience it seems that the only thing that overcomes this is strong interest based products focused on groups.

Have covered this question in a few replies but in short: anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS and encrypted at rest on the server. We hold the keys, at least for now until we implement a better solution. Posts are decrypted server-side and are encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS.

You can trust us because we say we are going to respect your privacy and we need to build trust and do what we say we will in order to build a great brand. I understand this often isn't enough and trust has been abused by other companies, and for that we'll keep pushing on the privacy front of the product.

Hey cool!

Media is encoded in base 64, encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS then encrypted at rest on our hosted servers. We're not using a CDN just a simple relational DB (but imagine at some point we will need to change that). For abusive content and data liabilities we currently comply with the abusive content standards set in place by the app store(s) and GDPR/equivalents.

Haha, clear!

Thanks, it's definitely a tough ask but I think the world will be better with these options (providing they succeed to such a level).

Can relate to that, it was the same for me.

Definitely!

The main reason was because we were building with the Ruby SDK and it didn't have bridging (future chat...) nor a direct E2EE solution included. In that, we had a bunch of business and product solutions we wanted to understand and Matrix was clouding our ability to do that.

Would still be very keen to see a consumer grade social network built on Matrix, though.

Chat soon!

Thanks! Glad you appreciate them.

Me too! Thanks for the comment.

Thanks for sharing! Haven't heard of Movim before so I will check it out.

Thanks!

It's a very valid question, the answer is that I don't think the market wants another FB (especially after today). In that, and from continually trying to scratch my own itch, we need to build something that works in an entirely different way.

If you try the app, we've turned a lot of 'standard' social features on their head, like how interactions work and are viewed in the app. But to answer your question:

- We will not ask for any personal information (such as job, school, interests etc). - We will not add noise on the feed, such as what other people are liking/commenting on. - We will not have any third party content on the feed. Eg anything that isn't from your contacts you have circled. - We currently (and will continue) to only show you posts from contacts you have actively circled. - We currently (and will continue to) keep the feed in chronological order.

Thanks, it's been a journey and appreciate the kind words!

Matrix is great, as I mentioned in one the replies, we were also building with the Ruby SDK and decided against in the end. Will update the site to reflect this & your comments.

#1 Very true, the value is determined by the users and the content they bring to the app. Because you broadcast to a specific audience, we've designed Circles to be a place for sharing things that you don't share on chat or social media. So far this has encouraged people to invite their closest contacts to the app. We also have ideas for discovery and single player features that we're building. Since you applied to YC with your version, what were your ideas around solving the cold start?

#2 Apologies for the mixed messages there! We finished the video whilst we were building on Matrix (E2EE) but our current stack has encryption at rest on our servers and anything you share in Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS.

#3 Great points and I hadn't heard this feedback before - think that you have a point.

#4 We are currently Angel funded but plan to continue to build Circles as a utility fuelled social network (as opposed to media), in this we will charge for premium features.

In terms of the ad concern, through our choices we have already made that inconvenient to do. At the moment we do hold the encryption keys, but as privacy seems to be a great concern (as we expected it to be) we will continue to push forward our practices on privacy.

So to be clear, anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS, then encrypted at rest on our servers, to which we currently (but hopefully not for long) hold the keys.

We don't actively log or analyse that information, no.

Appreciate this! We really welcome the feedback & are happy to hear it, positive or negative.

Appreciate this, thanks! The points you've made here hit the nail on the head for taking the choices we have.

Would love to chat about your current social usage and what you would expect from us in a way that you'd be happy to pay for. Can get me via email at james@oncircles.com if you'd be up for chatting!

That's fair enough! We're definitely not trying to build for everyone and it's good you have solutions set for yourself. Our proposition is simply to have a place to share/broadcast to the different sets of people in your life, away from social media.

In that, chat apps are great but are not designed for sharing individual updates, without running several different conversations & dealing with notifications.

Appreciate the feedback though & hopefully we'll develop into something that can gets you excited.

Hey, thanks for trying us out. And sorry about the bug(s)!

Let me get some solutions and will push an update to the app store (also for Android).

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

That's a great point. Our baseline assumption has been that, by and large, people would not pay for a social networking function on its own. So in that we've been hesitant to talk about monetisation with future features.

Thanks! It's been a journey.

Signal has definitely been a source of practice here. How would you imagine we do this comparison, on the landing page?

Definitely get where you're coming from here - have noted.

Noted!

Yes. Well that's true if there is little content shared and you are considering it from the perspective of your whole friends list. Generally people are selecting who they want to share to, and sharing things they otherwise wouldn't because there is a heightened level of comfort with their audience. Would love you to give it a try and tell me the same thing after a few friends are on there!

If you mean it stops people using social media, it doesn't. But if you're talking about how people thus far have shared content on the app, they share much more authentically because they are sharing to a small group of people who they have personally selected. It's also outside of the spaces where they normally post more pristine things, which helps.

I'm also very interested in open protocols, like Matrix and DeSo. However I disagree that everything has to turn into a media behemoth like Facebook. You make what you measure.

Well if we can't find monetisation that's a problem. I think we're beyond 2010 though, and people are much more open to paying for signal based information as shown by Substack, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, Bumble and other services.

Ha. You've made a point there. Still waiting to be disproved in US/EU... Although WeChat is a great app and it's done insanely great (however they have added some weird TikTok like features recently).

That's a solid point and hence why we've been reluctant to set out a future monetisation strategy. However...

In terms of monetising utility, Beeper/Texts.com seem to be getting a lot of attention, where they charge 10$ a month for their interoperable chat service. People seem to be happy to pay to have a centralised client for all their chats.

Otherwise as you've mentioned you have status signals, which is the case for Twitter Blue too. There's also the dating apps.

That's cool, I've never heard of HalloApp but just downloaded! Bar the chat function, how are you finding it?

Thanks, I get what you're saying here. Often times I find myself adding people to two circles or more. Although there is the option to create new circles I generally recommend keeping close to the existing circles that are created with each account.

On that point we also offer a quick/simple mechanism for sharing to specific contacts. So you're able to share to circles and/or specific contacts.

If you try the app, I would be keen to hear your feedback. Shoot me an email if that is the case.

Strange, thanks for bumping this. It works with copy paste so I must have done something with the formatting.