We need whatsapp/telegram/signal to display a feed based on user's status and nothing more. It's almost free, frictionless and free from ads (for now). But sharing without the widest audience (just to the social graph of your contacts).
It could bring back Google+'s circles so you don't share the same stuff with colleagues and friends and family, but your feed page would display it all the same.
Decentralized micro blogging without the huge tech cost and barrier of entry of mastodon.
People could choose how people are allowed to react to their status: limited in time, to the latest status update, limited to emoji/thumbs up reactions, allows starting new chat with that status as a topic, etc.
There's no money in it though, so maybe bring back the old whatsapp model ? 1€ for 6 months or something ?
Or maybe just tell people to start a group chat in which they post updates ? Facebook/Twitter/Instagram got that easy to post/single tunnel thing simplified to the max, I don't think you can do better without being centralized.
I find group chats with different groups of friends and family has filled this niche. There's no ads. There's no technical barrier to entry. No need to even sign up for a service. The stakes are low, messages can just be a meme or some nice photos from a day trip. The only downside is the ephemeral nature of texting. Even then, my MIL figured out how to save pictures to her phone and they occasionally show up in the calendars she makes as Christmas gifts.
Imho, the big toxic thing on Facebook wasn't the "news", it was "your friend liked this" and "your friend commented on this". That's where we get inundated with awfulness. My friends don't post/share terrible stuff, but they do occasionally interact with terrible stuff.
I think the ideal would be if everyone had social account like they do with email where they post their content be it pictures text video what have you. and friending someone was simply subscribbing to a rss feed hosted by that persons provider. possiblly with a automated generation and exchange of pgp key for encryption/signing under the hood
Social media sites generally want a large user base. This approach sounds very technical so I'd imagine this being a big barrier to entry. PGP will make this even worse.
We need whatsapp/telegram/signal to display a feed based on user's status and nothing more. It's almost free, frictionless and free from ads (for now). But sharing without the widest audience (just to the social graph of your contacts).
It could bring back Google+'s circles so you don't share the same stuff with colleagues and friends and family, but your feed page would display it all the same.
Decentralized micro blogging without the huge tech cost and barrier of entry of mastodon.
People could choose how people are allowed to react to their status: limited in time, to the latest status update, limited to emoji/thumbs up reactions, allows starting new chat with that status as a topic, etc.
It also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce which I thought had some great ideas at the time.
There's no money in it though, so maybe bring back the old whatsapp model ? 1€ for 6 months or something ?
Or maybe just tell people to start a group chat in which they post updates ? Facebook/Twitter/Instagram got that easy to post/single tunnel thing simplified to the max, I don't think you can do better without being centralized.