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

How to run a small social network site for your friends

runyourown.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 218 posts

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#111

Post by toyg »

pjc50 wrote: post #89
brnt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that when interaction is designed to be disposable and replaceable, i.e. matchmaking, no real community can form.

This is rather bad news as an implication for Tinder.

All dating sites have effectively two sets of users: people who use it until they get a long-term partner (A), and people who can use it forever because they are unlikely or unwilling to get a long-term partner (B). That is effectively intrinsic to the activity they are born to serve (dating). This said, there are enough people belonging to the B set to keep them in business pretty much forever.

There is also the option to provide ramps for people in A towards some other form of socialization (double dates? dinner parties?), but I don't think anyone really tried it yet.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#112

Post by nhumrich »

taccie wrote: post #42

Not really meant for friends, but for organizations and companies we have build Open Social as open-source platform: https://www.drupal.org/project/social and SaaS at https://www.getopensocial.com/ We are happy to have the backing of orgs as the UN and the European Commission. Goal is to go fully decoupled using React and GraphQL next year.

Open social looks really awesome, but also looks intentionally hard to find the source code to, and figure out how to run it.

There are no pricing information or demo videos on the website, so it's hard to know if the saas pricing is even feasible, and no video to help engage interest. It just says "request a demo". Why can't I watch a pre-recorded demo?

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#113

Post by nhumrich »

high_5 wrote: post #98

How about just having Signal groups?

Uh. I personally hate signal groups. If you ever lose your phone, you loose all history. The desktop app works, but won't show any history. I know in signals eyes this is intentional, but it's also silly. I had access to all that information, it's not any less safe on a new device that I have to prove I own.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#114

Post by gurleen_s »

hemloc_io wrote: post #13

I have what I think is a unique perspective on this. Private small self run social media already exists. It's personal Minecraft servers. When I was younger I ran a Minecraft server out of my toaster of a PC. Friends hopped on, made their own little houses, built stuff and talked. Friends would pass in and out and in order to get in you had to be invited! I'd say max there were 10-20 people on there somewhat consiste…

This used to be the case with TeamSpeak/Mumble too back in the day. Some of my favorite memories as a teenager was setting up Teamspeak servers on a Linode box and setting up everything. I’m glad Discord is making that easier for kids today.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#115

Post by zimpenfish »

skinkestek wrote: post #59
zimpenfish wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much as I don't want to promote them (it was a toxic hell working there), Kalido were trying to do this kind of "match interest in area and generate introductions". https://www.kalido.me

I tried looking at it briefly and the first thought that hit me is if someone except MeWe[1] is finally trying to recreate the great parts of the social network part of Google+. Would this be correct? Edit: I searched HN and the only reference I could find to Kalido was your comment(!). It looks so promising yet from the comment it doesn't seem like either something I shouldn't want to touch (like Something Awful) or…

> It looks so promising yet from the comment it doesn't seem like either something I shouldn't want to touch

I can't speak to the communities on there - I just worked there, never really used it myself (but the founders and others who work there do use it to make connections, I believe.)

> more like a weird enterprise cross breed between linkedIn and Google+, not a general social network

Yeah, the main thrust is that it's an "AI powered LinkedIn for generating communities" but there was good support for "find people who like near " and get suggestions if people appeared near you with similar interests (" also likes and is near you in ").

> this has slipped by

I don't think they've got around to making a big publicity push yet.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#116

Post by Alex3917 »

account42 wrote: post #102
Nerada wrote: post #14

I miss how every hobby had a forum running on phpBB, SimpleMachines, Invision, etc. HN is great, but it's very point in time. If I find an interesting topic posted over a day ago, it's never getting new replies. It's a snapshot of the thoughts on that topic for that single day, nothing more.

As much as I like threaded discussion like on HN I think it makes following discussion over a longer period of time almost impossible as you need to look all over the tree for new replies. Even reddit's highlighting of new posts does not really fix that and is s paid feaure anyway (except in the subs you moderate) so won't have any effect on the nature of the community. Maybe having both a threaded view for the first…

Scoop places a [new] tag next to comments that have been posted since the last time you refreshed the page, so that you can just Ctrl-F. So there have been popular sites doing this for 20+ years, e.g. Kuro5hin and DailyKos. HN just hasn't had features like this due to being limited by single threaded compute for various reasons. Although if the comments were served via an API, this could now be down in the front end with just the timestamp of when each user last refreshed each page.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#117

Post by thegeekpirate »

danieldevries wrote: post #69
drorco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been like that with many multiplayer games to some extent before the age of matchmaking. Someone sets up a dedicated server with certain mods/game configuration, and that would be yours and other randoms favorite server. Over time, you'd actually become a community. I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the…

Surely you meant UT99... ;-) A sprawling list of servers to join. Ahhh the memories. headshots jumping off the upper area of deck16. Console gaming and auto joining servers like in CoD. Bleh. Zero sense of community. Before we all met on IRC quakenet in random clan channels.

Speaking of UT99... it's still getting patches https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

> OldUnreal took over maintenance of the Unreal Tournament code base after reaching an agreement with Epic Games in 2019.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#118

Post by oxymoran »

“ As an example, Friend Camp is anti-free-speech, at least in the sense that freedom of speech is commonly understood as a value. This is repulsive to some people on both the left and the right, and it's important that people with that core value find somewhere other than Friend Camp to set up their online home.

For those wondering, the RationalWiki definition of freedom of speech is exactly the kind of freedom of speech we take issue with on our server. Again, you may find this abhorrent, but you don't have to join our server, and we're never going to house more than a few dozen people.”

Lolololololololooololol. Even rational wiki is too moderate.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#119

Post by GekkePrutser »

darcys22 wrote: post #49

The best social network these days is a smallish closed group chat on your favourite platform. There are apps that exist already to keep these private if you wish. But the key is curating the chat so there is good signal from friends who arnt starting flame wars.

This, I think this is really why Facebook bought WhatsApp.. Because they buy everything they view as a threat and it kinda is.

Re: How to run a small social network site for your friends

#120

Post by mitchdoogle »

np- wrote: post #108
drorco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been like that with many multiplayer games to some extent before the age of matchmaking. Someone sets up a dedicated server with certain mods/game configuration, and that would be yours and other randoms favorite server. Over time, you'd actually become a community. I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the…

That’s actually interesting—I used to really be into multiplayer games when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and have some great memories of virtual hangs with friends both real and offline. My interest in online gaming basically dropped to zero (or even negative) after that, which seems to coincidence with when matchmaking started becoming a thing. I think it was it Halo 2 that was the first big matchmaking game…

Interesting, I was just thinking Halo 2 was great for that sort of thing. I have some fond memories of joining private parties and goofing around for hours hunting for glitches
Post reply on HN