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

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.

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.

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

It’s an oxy, moron.

> 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