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

oncircles.com

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

#131

Post by jstrafy »

akamia wrote: post #112
jstrafy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Ads on any sort of app are generally targeted. Meaning they use personal information, including browsing history, to serve you specific ads that you are more likely to click on. By encrypting data at rest and, asking for little personal information, we purposely make it more difficult for us as a company to serve targeted ads. Ideally it would be impossible and this is what we aim for in the short term. - Fair poin…

I think you need to clarify what you mean by at rest. You mention browser history but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's encrypted in the browser. If you mean it's encrypted within your data store on your servers, that's great for security but doesn't really address the ad concern. I'm assuming you hold the encryption keys. If that's the case, you can decrypt the users' data in your data store for ad targetin…

In terms of the ad concern, through our choices we have already made that inconvenient to do. At the moment we do hold the encryption keys, but as privacy seems to be a great concern (as we expected it to be) we will continue to push forward our practices on privacy.

So to be clear, anything you share on Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS, then encrypted at rest on our servers, to which we currently (but hopefully not for long) hold the keys.

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

#132

Post by jstrafy »

ghughes wrote: post #105

Congrats! It's impressive to go from learning to code, to shipping a product with this level of polish, in less than two years. I tried to build essentially the same thing on top of Matrix (and got rejected from YC in the process) - I haven't tried the app yet but I have some initial thoughts and questions. I really hope you succeed with this; forgive me if I come across as a skeptic. #1 question: every notable socia…

Thanks, it's been a journey and appreciate the kind words!

Matrix is great, as I mentioned in one the replies, we were also building with the Ruby SDK and decided against in the end. Will update the site to reflect this & your comments.

#1 Very true, the value is determined by the users and the content they bring to the app. Because you broadcast to a specific audience, we've designed Circles to be a place for sharing things that you don't share on chat or social media. So far this has encouraged people to invite their closest contacts to the app. We also have ideas for discovery and single player features that we're building. Since you applied to YC with your version, what were your ideas around solving the cold start?

#2 Apologies for the mixed messages there! We finished the video whilst we were building on Matrix (E2EE) but our current stack has encryption at rest on our servers and anything you share in Circles is encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS.

#3 Great points and I hadn't heard this feedback before - think that you have a point.

#4 We are currently Angel funded but plan to continue to build Circles as a utility fuelled social network (as opposed to media), in this we will charge for premium features.

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

#133

Post by jstrafy »

a_zaydak wrote: post #108

Congrats on the launch! How do you prevent this from turning into another FB? Is there a difference between using this and using FB where you have all of your posts / activity only viewable with your friends? I guess one obvious difference is FB's advertising and data mining. Are there any features that you absolutely will not add to Circles in the future because they will 'cross the line' into turning Circles into a…

Thanks!

It's a very valid question, the answer is that I don't think the market wants another FB (especially after today). In that, and from continually trying to scratch my own itch, we need to build something that works in an entirely different way.

If you try the app, we've turned a lot of 'standard' social features on their head, like how interactions work and are viewed in the app. But to answer your question:

- We will not ask for any personal information (such as job, school, interests etc). - We will not add noise on the feed, such as what other people are liking/commenting on. - We will not have any third party content on the feed. Eg anything that isn't from your contacts you have circled. - We currently (and will continue) to only show you posts from contacts you have actively circled. - We currently (and will continue to) keep the feed in chronological order.

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

#137

Post by jstrafy »

cvwright wrote: post #113
jstrafy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super simple, I didn't know how to code 18 months ago so when we started (was just I at that point), I stared building with what I could. The front end is built with React Native (JS) as it provides a way for us to more or less maintain two OS with one codebase. It also is somewhat simple for us to convert out code for web with react-native-web. We do use a series of community build packages (more than I would like)…

Aw man, sorry to hear that Matrix didn't work out for you. There's definitely a cost to building on an early-stage technology with a lot of its own complexity. (Heh, ask me how I know...) Still, super impressed at what you've built. Looking forward to syncing up soon!

Definitely!

The main reason was because we were building with the Ruby SDK and it didn't have bridging (future chat...) nor a direct E2EE solution included. In that, we had a bunch of business and product solutions we wanted to understand and Matrix was clouding our ability to do that.

Would still be very keen to see a consumer grade social network built on Matrix, though.

Chat soon!

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

#138

Post by jstrafy »

sgt wrote: post #70
jstrafy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. The major difference is that you need to add people to Circles to see from and share to them, the entire UX is focused on Circles. 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…

You're brave taking on this task. Many have failed.. or messed up as they were succeeding. I recently stopped using Instagram because it was filling up with nonsense. Also they push features in your face that you don't really want to use. Facebook is also a sad story. But for some reason we keep returning. We're like little rats in an experiment, waiting for our next endorphin jolt.

Thanks, it's definitely a tough ask but I think the world will be better with these options (providing they succeed to such a level).

Can relate to that, it was the same for me.

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

#139

Post by jstrafy »

sackerhews wrote: post #122
jstrafy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Thanks for this feedback! We started with mobile because that's the dominant force these days but depending on movement it would be great to create a web-app or desktop client.

For the record, I'm not going to install an desktop app either to use a web service :)

Haha, clear!

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

#140

Post by jstrafy »

gh123man wrote: post #99

I'd love to learn how you are handling media/photo storage from both a technical and practical perspective. Some questions that come to mind: are you using a dedicated service or did you build it yourself? Are you using a CDN? How do you plan to deal with abusive content and the liability that comes with storing photos? I am also working on an app where hosting photos would be a nice feature - but the risk/undertakin…

Hey cool!

Media is encoded in base 64, encrypted in transit with SSL/TLS then encrypted at rest on our hosted servers. We're not using a CDN just a simple relational DB (but imagine at some point we will need to change that). For abusive content and data liabilities we currently comply with the abusive content standards set in place by the app store(s) and GDPR/equivalents.

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