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

I agree. Millions of people will never ever pay for something they can have for free with instagram. And because the adoption rate will be slow they will have to use instagram anyway in the meantime to find the content and people there which will kill your adoption rate unless you invest in huge amounts in marketing.

You can try to built something new but people who value privacy are not in the masses. Most people don’t care at all unless in immediate threat (like usurpation or stealing money).

There is already so many platforms that do just that and we don’t know about them because the problem also lies there. It’s hard to get known in the internet now with all the services that exists and distractions there is.

For example I haven’t been in the AppStore in years, only searching for something specific. Never ever for discovery of what is in there. Many, many people are like that as well which makes them hard to reach.

I think you are worried about the wrong problem. Forget about the influencers for a moment - what will your source of revenue be if you don't have an ad network?

Users are the content on social networks. If you charge them to join, you will have fewer users and less content on the network. That reduces the value so you can't charge as much, and the cycle continues.

This is a remarkably consistent failure of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative space. In the time I've been alive we've gone from bulky PC and monitor combos that took up entire desks to light-as-a-feather laptops that pack thousands of times more power and storage space, we've gone from me working for a day to figure out a CD burner to get all of my data on my computer backed up to a disk (about 550 MB) to today, when I regularly as part of my creative side of my role, toss around files over a network that are as much if not larger than that, and it's barely an inconvenience. Yet the topic of "how do we monetize social media" utterly brings an otherwise brilliant community to a shrug.

I don't think you're entirely wrong, mind you, ad supported services are the default and any competing service that requires payment operates at a disadvantage, which is why I continuously come back to the idea that surveillance capitalism needs to be regulated. On a recent episode of Better Offline, the host interviewed an economist who has suggested a steep tax on digital ad spend, specifically to open the space to alternatives away from people giving away their privacy. I think that's a great idea, not as extreme as my ideal solution which would be the utter dismantling of surveillance capitalism entirely, but still.

The problem is money is literally the power here, as it is in most places, and the users are contributing none, and the advertisers are contributing all, and this is basically the source of every cancerous, inhumane and exploitative problem you can think of in social media. And you are 100% correct: a paid instagram will never succeed as long as instagram remains free. Then, IMO, the logical next step is we need to make it not free, or at the very least, take up some of that profit and put it towards other ends that we can actually affect change on.

"The market" is clearly incapable of solving social media, it only has made it worse, ever, ever worse. We need something else.

I worked on something very similar: a privacy-first Instagram clone built on top of Matrix. We had a prototype and some initial users.

Here's the unfortunate truth:

The challenge of overcoming the network effect is _the_ problem you're solving here. Nothing else really matters. Almost nobody will care that it's privacy-first. Asking HN to help you figure this out indicates to me that you should do something else.

I see many takes in the comments but no one seems to be addressing the fact that privacy and social are opposites of each other. I think you could state the problem better- for example sharing with the audience that you expect to share with or some better controls on who sees what. But these alone are not good enough differentiation and in theory Facebook has very fine grained privacy controls and no one bothers to set this correctly and advertisers still see more than what you set etc

It is a hairy problem but it’s hard to frame it in such a way as to make it attractive enough to the masses to switch from existing networks