Show HN: What do you think of my new social app?

True most networks are passive, and the public networks are catering for this. I would also agree that the chat apps is a great solution for close connections and often use this as their primary social network for this reason.

From experience, because chat is a linear thread, conversation focused and notification heavy, it's really not good for sharing things that don't directly concern the person/group you're talking to.

So Circles is all about creating a space for sharing your life with those who matter most, sharing things that you don't necessarily need to share but would like to away from the spotlight of social media. For example I've been sharing my travels in Portugal to my close friends and family circles (around 20 people who are mainly not interconnected). If I did this on chat I would be opening/maintaining 10+ conversations about myself! This is the problem we're solving currently.

That said, overall I agree that there's an overlap there that takes away from the value we offer to people right now. Gotta start somewhere though!

Often people don't use the list feature on Facebook because a core product assumption of Facebook is that everyone you add is your friend, and lists are not a priority in the Facebook experience. The Facebook sharing experience is also centred around engagement, where more numbers makes you look better. So users have the option of using lists on Facebook but there's little incentive placed there.

Lists also don't have much impact what you see. This means on Facebook the vast, vast majority of content still comes from people you don't really care about and random content accounts from businesses and influencers. So secondarily, Circles feed is simply chronological and only contains direct content from people you have added to a circle.

1. The vast majority of our privacy is in product experience. Sharing with less people instead of everyone, making reactions and comments only visible between mutual contacts. 2. Names, Posts, comments and replies are encrypted at rest. 3. We sync your phonebook for contact discovery and don't store it on our servers. Therefore it is not linked to your identity. This is a hard problem to solve as Signal wrote in this blog post (https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/)

That said, privacy is a super important issue and external testing and open-sourcing is something that we desire to do. So thanks for the checker here!

It would have been a great idea to add a small price in the app store, as my core assumption was that people would not pay for a social networking app alone. Maybe I will change my assumption there. You don't need to answer this if uncomfortable doing so (or can send by email) but how much would you pay today to know the app is sustained ad-free?

Otherwise, we are fortunate to be funded by a single angel who gives us freedom to decide the path of the company. He invested with the recognition that the tides on privacy and social media are changing and that a more intimate, private social network would be a definite solution in the future (In his words, "the two most important parts of anyone's network are the closest circles and the fringes, so Circles focuses on the former").

Our next stop was to build a Circles designed interoperable chat that would allow you to send and receive messages to pretty much any major third party app. We would charge for this. However, right now we collect no individual data from our users and most user information is encrypted at rest, making it very hard for us to build any real ads mechanism.

In relation to group chats, there is a notable difference in how Circles are set up. In a group chat everything is shared to the group, and all the members are directly connected to each other because they are in that group. Circles in their current setup are closer to broadcast lists.