Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#11

Post by cvwright »

Well, since you asked... :-)

I've been working on something in this space for a little while. It's called Circles. Originally, I just wanted a safer and easier way to share baby photos with my extended family. Safer than posting pictures of my kid publicly on Facebook. Easier / more convenient than pinging the crap out of everyone's phone on Signal.

It's kind of like a bare-bones version of Facebook. Only you can have multiple social circles (like in G+), each with your own "wall" for posting stuff and timeline of posts from the friends that you're following there.

All posts are E2E encrypted, using the same crypto as in Element/Matrix, and the back end is just a standard Matrix server. The E2EE prevents the server from seeing what you post, or from injecting crap into your timeline. You can use your own Matrix server, or you can sign up to create an account on mine.

It's open source: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

You're welcome to try out the beta if you want: https://testflight.apple.com/join/cwsJZed9

If all goes well, it should go live in the App Store later this month.

Unfortunately it's iOS only for now. I'm working as fast as I can to get started on an Android version.

If you try it out, please let me know what you think! Thanks!!!

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#12

Post by seltzered_ »

https://Hylo.com is doing some interesting things with group coordination, and intended to be a non-profit I think.

Past year has also felt like the rise of using paid saas groups like circle.so and mightynetworks.

And for local groups seen friends migrate to signal.

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#13

Post by micropresident »

I have been working on a decentralized social media platform that uses a token w/o cash value as a reputation and moderation system. The goal is to avoid needing a centralized content moderator. I'd love to chat about it if it sounds interesting.

We're currently using a telegram group chat as groups are still in development, only direct messages work due to complexity around the encryption.

A link to our chat is here: https://t.me/stampchat

A description of how things work is here: https://www.stampchat.io/whitepaper.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#15

Post by Natfan »

micropresident wrote: post #13

I have been working on a decentralized social media platform that uses a token w/o cash value as a reputation and moderation system. The goal is to avoid needing a centralized content moderator. I'd love to chat about it if it sounds interesting. We're currently using a telegram group chat as groups are still in development, only direct messages work due to complexity around the encryption. A link to our chat is here…

I'd love to read your FAQ, but the collapse elements do not work on Chrome 92.0.4515.131.

https://www.stampchat.io/faq

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#16

Post by missedthecue »

claudiulodro wrote: post #3

Have you tried calling, texting, or e-mailing them? That's been working great as a "social media replacement" for many people I know after they ditched the online social media companies.

Do you just send out a mass email blast updating all your friends that you took the family to disney world? How does that work?

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#18

Post by 8jef »

Not a social media per se, but a decentralized hosting platform that will distribute decentralized apps securely, where one will privately host its own data and metadata on a home node.

https://holochain.org/

Apps in development (hApps) includes Acorn (for teams), Elemental chat (first actually available and functional distributed hApp), Snap mail, Junto, and more coming.

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#19

Post by kshowkat »

Not quite social media in the standard sense, but we've been working on https://wager.town -- a free-to-play "wagering game" that acts essentially as an open-ended prediction market. Limited to sports-fans so it's pretty niche, but our Discord feels nice and communal which was our goal.

Re: Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

#20

Post by xyzzy21 »

I've been on the Internet since it was still called "Arpanet".

There is NO GOOD SOCIAL MEDIA - its nature is primarily negative and bad for society. The reason is that it's inherently addictive by design and it operates faster than the biological time constants of rationality. It can never be made "safe". It will always have negative outcomes.

Post reply on HN