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

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."

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.

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...?

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.]

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?