I am interested in building a new social network but I want it to be limited to North America only. I dont like what platforms like Reddit has become nowadays (too much moderation and there is too many power mods fighting for control) and rampant bot abuse to grow communities. As someone that has been on the internet for a while I also dont like how political platforms like reddit has become so I want to make sure all political content is restricted or super duper limited. The internet that I grew up with wasnt this political or bombareded with political news and such, I feel like this is really bad for peoples mental health and would like to help them. What are your guys thoughts, what would make a new social network be successful? I have been modding on Reddit for a while and one of the good things the platform has done is that it hasnt turned into Twitter or platforms like Bluesky which everyone is still uncertain about. But reddit also sucks, they had the whole API fiasco and people blacked out there subs. There are still some small subs to this day that are abandoned from that period of time.
Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#2All you have to do is simply solve the problem of moderation and bots
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#3From your comment here, you clearly have a strong idea about what you want to see, so stop pretending to be offended by strong moderation. Just stick to making a forum with a niche that you like. That way you can own it and ban whoever is making trouble for you.
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#4The first thing is to check if a social network already exists that meets your needs such as a closed group using Telegram.
I picked the first search result...
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#5The first thing is to check if a social network already exists that meets your needs such as a closed group using Telegram. I picked the first search result... https://www.jploft.com/blog/best-social-media-apps
I dont like Telegram, so far I have been testing Lemmy and we have like an instance or something working here: https://canzuck.zone/ to experiment with. Telegram kind of scares me I dont like what it has become. I use Discord nowadays, and if Discord made their chats or some of their communities visible online on Google, they would give other social networks a run for their money imho. For instance the 3d printing community on Discord is very nice when I need help with my 3d printing it would be great if they were on Google, but with all the LLM and scraping stuff going on I can see why they might not want to do that even if they had plans before.
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#6You can set up a Mastodon instance, choose your method to filter who can register and choose whether it will federate with other instances.
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#7You can't. Your best bet is to joint the fediverse so you can interoperate with existing networks, like Mastodon.
> too much moderation
> rampant bot abuse
You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation. These two of your goals are at odds with each other.
I will also say that almost 100% of the value of reddit is the moderation. After Musk eviscerated Twitter's moderation, it became more of a cesspit and people have been leaving for better-moderated networks.
> I want to make sure all political content is restricted or super duper limited
How are you going to do this without moderation?
What's your definition is political? Is discussing climate change political? What about health care?
If filtering certain topics or moderating a social network were a simple problem, bigger companies (like Meta) would've solved it without armies of human moderators.
Which also begs the question: how would you keep CSAM off your network?
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#8Bluesky has an algorithmic feed even though people think it doesn't.
I am annoyed by emotionally negative political content on Mastodon and had to make a number of rules (no "fascist", "republican", "Trump", ...) to make it tolerable.
I found Bluesky's algorithmic feed eliminated about 75% of emotionally negative content and thought it was a good feed without any rules (though I was being careful who I follow.) Then the inauguration happened and there was a huge exodus of people from X and the feed either got overwhelmed with them or they were deliberately giving activists and journalists a lot of visibility so they build up followers quickly.
I've been wanting to make a "negative people" filter to make it easier to choose people to follow, the idea is to make a ModernBERT + LSTM classifier which I think will outperform my miniLM + pooling + SVM classifier. I need something that can look at images and detect "text in images" such as screenshots and image memes to block those too.
So from my viewpoint people can post what they want, but I won't read it. Probably Threads is using some technology like this to suppress politics and negativity in general.
To tell if something is true you need to make a god. Politics and negativity aren't quite the same thing, but they are fellow travelers.
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#9You can't. Your best bet is to joint the fediverse so you can interoperate with existing networks, like Mastodon. > too much moderation > rampant bot abuse You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation. These two of your goals are at odds with each other. I will also say that almost 100% of the value of reddit is the moderation. After Musk eviscerated Twitter's moderation, it became mor…
> You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation.
I want to see a social network that solves the bot problem by requiring a fee to post.
Re: Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?
#10You can't. Your best bet is to joint the fediverse so you can interoperate with existing networks, like Mastodon. > too much moderation > rampant bot abuse You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation. These two of your goals are at odds with each other. I will also say that almost 100% of the value of reddit is the moderation. After Musk eviscerated Twitter's moderation, it became mor…
> You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation. I want to see a social network that solves the bot problem by requiring a fee to post.
It exists: well.com