The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.

>3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

If the things I'm posting could get feedback but don't, that tells me that the things I'm saying aren't really hitting with any of my friends. That's a valuable thing to know, whether or not you choose to act on it.

Facebook in the early years was for the most part exactly like what you are suggesting, but with likes, and I at least remember it being a pretty enjoyable place for a few years there (I joined at the very end of 2006).

"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

> I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing.

I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

I'd be glad to use the system you describe; I just wonder if it would ever draw more than a niche audience without those features that many people seem to find essential to whatever they're getting out of the experience.

> I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

Just to be clear about something though: this sort of person existed long before social media, would still exist without social media, and will continue to exist long after the current evolutions of social media

People are already moving towards the group chat model over the town square model, I read some articles on this recently that I can't find right now but it talks about the growth of Discord and the gradual decline of Facebook and Instagram. So I think people are already getting tired of such a like system.

I'll be honest, it sounds like you're trying to control my relationships with my friends and it sounds totally toxic.

I like the 1000 mutual connections only limit - that seems enough to get the job done. But "likes" are the online equivalent of the little "uh huh" sounds and head nods we make during real-life conversations to make the speaker feel heard and understood. This is normal healthy human interaction.

My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.

Yeah, if you don't give people some way to "like" things, you'll just get lots of comments that are nothing but heart emojis and such. It'd be like when AOL users discovered Usenet and there were lots of "Me too!" posts because they wanted to agree but didn't have anything to add.

As much as I love shilling IRC, Discord & Zulip have the right ideas with emoji reactions. It allows one to signal acknowledgement without spamming the chat. Frankly, Discord's recent decision to make reactions trigger push notifications was terrible.

> I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.

Good :D Let's revalue meaningful nuanced interactions over meaningless single bit signals. Even an emoji response rather than a like makes for better connection.

It’ll end up being number of comments. Which is great, because that’s the purpose of a social network; socializing.

> Which is great

Idk, that sounds horrible to me.

I'd rather not waste time reading through a deluge of low-quality comments, instead of quickly reading a few high-quality comments.

The comments will be full of GIFs of hearts...

Without comments, likes, feeds, OP should buy geocities.com instead of friendster.com .. Part of me feels that would be a better site to resurrect.

#4 & 5 finally address the slow poster problem. While chronological by friend does put those who never shut up first, it also means they get exactly one (1) entry in the feed.

I concur mostly, with one exception: I truly enjoyed the 'events' feed in Facebook, to be able to see what was happening and which concerts etc friends of mine were interested in that I could potentially join in on, so I would exclude that from the 'no public content' rule.

I like the sound of this. However, it seems dangerously close to living life without social media at all. What would make this a better experience than just having someone's phone number or adding them to a group chat?

What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.

Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.

That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.

> What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

"hey cousin, it's been a while! i was just thinking of you the other day, how've you been? what's new? miss you, hope to talk to you soon!"

People interacted with their cousins a few times per year prior to the internet and social media. So, it’s not good/bad strategy but instead can I do this if I’d like to?

Yes. You can. I still do many of these low frequency hellos/whatever they are via texts and sometimes calls. No from seeing something in social but instead from elsewhere. Example: look through old photos!

But I like the spark idea too.

You are correct. But maybe ypu have described Whatsapp?

I'm honestly confused at what's left after stripping all of this out that isn't basically just texting your buddies?

Yes, but with better UX.

That's what they mean, those 50 acquaintances are your mutual connection, not those 20 each you've never met.

True, my bad. I guess I was thinking of it though in the context of a recommendation to connect based on a mutual connection, whereby you could easily come up with a list of 1000 people who I don't know but that one of my friends does, since the context was a social media platform and that's a common feature

I would add:

7. No links.

Otherwise it will become an activist platform where the blues and the reds fight for clicks.

You would have a ghost town nobody uses then

Re. #1-3: meh

Re. #4/5: I want a chronological feed of my friends' posts, no algorithm. If I feel my friend is posting too much garbage, then I want to be able to "unfollow" them but still be "friends". I want to see what's going on in my friends' lives, not read or see politics/animals/etc.

Re. #6: STRONG AGREEMENT.

Best of luck on your journey! I made the transition from Friendster to MySpace when a bunch of my top 10 Friendster friends were dead.

Anyhoo, this will be a tough climb for you. Ello captured a lot of what you are going for, at least for users who were willing to part with Google+. Vine still rules for short-form video, Dodgeball still wins for mobile-first, there's Meerkat and Justin.TV for streaming, SixDegrees is still at it, and (let's be honest) most of us are still on AIM. I hear good things about Path too, they have an inspiring CEO and a unique product. Niches are the future; there's even a startup trying to help Harvard nerds get laid. I wish you the best!

10/10. Would use this time machine.

Path was awesome!

It really was. It had a great UX, and was just a better experience.

Curation instead of moderation.

The worst thing about running a content hosting platform is moderation. You will fail at it, and that failure will hurt people. Even worse, you replace success with victory.

The first move is to let your users help, by giving them the power to moderate their own spaces. Of course, as every web forum (and subreddit) has proven, this isn't a perfect solution. Even the best moderation can never be enough. Moderated spaces become echo chambers that war with one another. That's because power will always be abused for rent seeking. In the case of moderation, that means moderators abusing their authority to monopolize engagement; and narrative converging into dualist team-speak.

So what if we eliminate the hierarchy? Instead of letting a moderator decide what content shouldn't be seen, let users collaboratively decide what content they want to see.

Every published interaction is an attestation. It can be the presence of content itself, or it can be something about content. That might be a category, a logical assertion, an opinion, whatever. By providing a subjective attestation about some content, we can empower users to use boundaries to find content that is interesting, and avoid content that is undesirable. Users could choose the curated lists they trust, and collaborate on consensus.

Objective truth does not exist. Everything written is subjected to a specific perspective. By using boundaries instead of rules, we can accommodate this reality as a first class feature of the system. Friends aren't journalists anyway, so the goal of interaction was never objectivity to begin with.

By reframing interaction this way, we can have conversations instead of debates; and even if you do want to debate, you can leverage attestations to actually argue constructively.

Sounds like slashdot, in it's days of greatness.

It should encourage meaningful real-world engagements, activities, events, charity, business development. Everything about the app should facilitate real relationships.

Use AI to help arrange meetups, or propose group opportunities. Imagine having something like facebook groups where AI is there to help you actually hang out and do things. Schedule meetups, rekindle lost connections, find activities, develop relationships, develop new business ideas, activate civic engagements.

OP specified no addictive behaviors, I won't suggest ai using ;) I'd actually suggest a non ammitted ai network, just for humans, sometimes we'd need just to connect with real people instead of algorithms

sure but people are not great at organizing. it takes effort to schedule and send reminders. AI could help with the tedious parts

This won't work either socially or for funding. Local circles are where it's at in 2025. Exclusivity, but not even stated by implication, and for safety and confidence. Homey exclusivity, like a close friend's living room. Knowing people already is cool. Hanging out with people you already know is social proof. Lean into that. It's already there in the name. People remember that brand from days when making friends felt easy.

My off the cuff opinion, find a way to verify the people on the site are not bots and actually real. This is a hard problem with some expensive solutions, privacy implications, significant trade offs and real cost, however it may be worth trying to address. Imagine twitter (X) or facebook without the noise.

It's basically impossible. The sites that manage to be strict enough just end up with bots which are real phones in a building somewhere.

You just have to design so the bot's aren't relevant. The problem with Twitter, Facebook, and friends, is that they push the bot content at you, even if you don't follow them.

> It's basically impossible.

Require a fee to post.

The reason people suggested that for emails, is because you have to send a large number of times to spam. With social media, that's not true. A single post can be viewed a large number of times.

Use quadratic post fees. The larger the number of people who try to view a post, the larger the fee becomes or the post stops being viewable.

So the fee isn't a one-time fee, but an "open" fee that keeps increasing.

Another mechanism is to require a fee to view. If after viewing the content the user deems the content isn't valuable, they flag it in some way or they don't bookmark it, and this indicates the poster should pay the display fee.

Then you just get bots that support scams or overpriced garbage and can afford the posting fee.

It's a question of price. No bot can afford a fee that increases exponentially based on the number of views.

Similar to quadratic voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting

Yes. It's the algorithms.

Yeah this would definitely be a unique feature.

I still don't think it would work now though. People don't trust social networks like they trusted Facebook in the olden days, and they never will again.

Require an email address, charge a dollar a year and have a reasonable report / takedown policy. That’d probably be 99% of the problem gone.

This is an impossible to solve problem, attackers have the advantage.

Throwing out one idea: for the 30+ crowd with kids and families, how can you make it frictionless to maintain and build friendships, especially across different groups (building, schools, after schools, family)? Not necessarily as families, but just flagging events and making organizing events easier - my friends and I dont see each other nearly enough since we had kids. Everyone seems to be using WhatsApp for it and it's not great.

Friendster would be a great hit with the millennials. They had fond memories of that era and they’re done with the current social media trends. If you succeed with that niche, you might have a better chance.

You could probably make a decent niche business out of an ID verified, 30+ only social network. You'd need to find the killer use case though to get any kind of growth going.

Try to replicate niche groups like this https://www.ypo.org/

Make it impossible to sign up or add people through the site, you must physically touch phones to become friends or even get invited

Ha this is a cool idea!

Witty idea

1. Charge a small fee. Don't make the user the product.

2. No ads. See #1

3. Ensure the user is a real person by mailing them a one-time code on a postcard in the US mail, like Nextdoor used to do.

4. NO ALGORITHMIC FEED, unless you explicitly offer that on a separate tab.

Can't. You need to build a product that generates some revenue in order to pay for servers/developers. To do that, you need either subscribers or ads. People are only going to pay for it if it's really good AND there's a clear advantage over free users. People are only going to be online long enough to view ads if it's addictive. No other way around it.

For the 25-35 crowd I think there's a draw of "interesting activities for date night" that are low-commitment and could build a sense of community but don't require pre-planning. Really hard to build a business around, I know. But in NYC there are all these recent trends of run clubs, reading groups (events where people bring a book to a cozy location and collectively read with some mood lighting), and similar community-esque events that don't require anyone to interact but offer a forum for those that want it to happen. I was talking last night with a friend about dinner party services, which arrange for themed dinners, and we were saying how we would be interested in that but we wouldn't want to just meet random strangers, there would have to be some sort of draw to a theme or an interest group; otherwise we would just host with our own friends in our own networks. Meetup.com -- that came up in our conversation and neither of us had used it in years.

I think it would be cool if you kept some of the original Friendster design and color pallette, at least to start. I would love a "classic" social media site with a modern backend and mobile friendly frontend. For example, Facebook's early UI had a simple, consistent, and blocky style. Menus were sensible I could find what I wanted to do easily.

I’ve made my own attempt in building a social network [0] and it’s evening running for me and my friends.

Here are few things I’ve encountered during the development:

- Based on my experience private only approach does not work. It’s all about network effects and if users can’t send their post to all friends, they’ll just move on to a different platform

- chronological friends only feed is really boring. Not that it’s bad per de, but it’s hard to convince people to stay if the service is not entertaining

It can also be me not being able to market the project right. Good luck with your attempt!

[0] https://github.com/can3p/pcom

Making male friends off apps can be complicated like Im actually only looking for regular friendship nothing else with dudes who like similar activities (hike, bike, outdoors, play guitar, sports, happy hour).

I've used Bumble For Friends since 2020 and have met 10 to 15 dudes for regular platonic friendship but 12.5 wanted more (sex, dating). So only 2.5 were looking for regular platonic male friendship ... the half one was with a guy who was bi and he never crossed the line until he did (year & half later) and that was that.

Luckily last year I found a new good normal (normal like growing up when you just made regular non-sexual friendships) dude friend and travel buddy and he has connected me to other dudes who just want normal regular dude friendships. All good if you aren't straight but unfortunately our male minds the majority think apps are to connect people for more then friendship. Which is a bummer!

With that in mind others have said use friendster for a way for people to come together in real life. Don't do AI stuff unless your using it to verify people. People indeed want real/genuine and the best way to do that is create local groups for people to meet to create friendships organically. Its a normal way to make friends for all sexes as we do and have done via work and while in/thru school. What im and everyone else is describing sounds like meetup.com but one that is free and for a younger generation.

They should have just named it something else and I think that would have made a difference in audience. The name "Bumble" is synonymous with dating, and calling it "Bumble For Friends" is like saying "friends and maybe more" on a psychological level.

There's a looming question you haven't answered: Are you OK with having a platonic friend that happens to be interested in you sexually? You haven't answered this question, but you seem to have strongly implied the answer, "no".

If that's the case, then maybe this is a good opportunity to reconsider. I for one have had many great platonic relationships with women that I am interested in sexually. Interest is not pursuit. If I had avoided every platonic relationship that could feel like a failed sexual pursuit, I would have missed out on a lot of great friends.

If they act as friends only and do not try to go elsewhere sure I’m fine either way. I myself in life have had friends where if they too showed interest then it would’ve been more, but I knew what those relationships were & enjoyed them as is ..find my fun & love elsewhere.

I mentioned I made a solid platonic friend and travel buddy. I hang out with weekly and we go to happy hours with other straight to non-straight dudes. Only one of them has been inappropriate, but we worked it out and there are no more advances. If they want to continue being my friend great as that’s all, I’m looking for on a friends app and/or through happy hours.

And personally if they called it, something else that problem would still exist.

You can't make it great again, because in large part these type of projects were built on a lie, and now everyone knows the lie.

The lie itself doesn't start out being a lie, but it rapidly becomes the lie in the aggregate of the choices you must make behind the scenes along the way emergent-ly from the centralized nature of any platform which is needed for moderation, and the requirements to operate as a business.

Any system with two or more mandates always fails the lesser of the mandates.

There can be no trust, Facebook and its analogues have used it all up.

You don't develop strong relationships by spending your time in front of a computer. Real friends don't seek friends on social media.

As with any communication channel today, you also must capably defend your platform from all manner of nation-state threats that now use 5th Generation Warfare on individuals through social media. Propaganda, Isolation, Torture, Radicalization. If you don't know a thing about these very dark things, there's no shot in the dark where you can actually come up with something that works as a stopgap.

The juice simply isn't worth the squeeze because its a blackhole, and once Scylla has you she pulls you in.

This is a somewhat lame suggestion but in the spirit of Pinboard/del.icio.us or Bluesky/Twitter, a well-supported copy of OG Friendster or Facebook could just work to some degree.

I don't use social media outside of old.reddit if that counts but would strongly consider something like this. It would be easy to describe to friends; my friends/family over 30 are nostalgic and those under 30, especially those living on their own now, are curious about alternatives to the current state of things.

thank you, yes this was my original plan and kind of the default plan

Good luck then, I'm interested and will stay tuned! There are some interesting possibilities for doing the old thing with new technology but restraint is key.

I was one of the Ello devs (mobile, then web, then backend, then all of it).

My guess is that you'll have some diehard fans early on - Ello did, and they stayed to the end (thanks!) and they'll bemoan every single change - just roll with it, trust yourself but also listen to them.

If you get some success you will have a spammer problem (esp porn), but if you limit (better: don't have) public feeds maybe you can avoid the worst of this. Mutual follow makes sense as a way to limit the blast radius of bad actors, but then people will get spammed by friend requests. It SUCKS. Maybe you punish accounts that blast lots of requests but get very few follows back. We did something like this.

Actually one idea that I think would work well: once you have a "this is a spam account" determination, hide those spam accounts from real users, but let them engage with other spam accounts. This will cost you some compute time, but it will give them the feeling that they are being successful without distracting users.

Good luck!

Good luck with this project!

I have one thought to share with you, may or may not be relevant to your plans:

Doom scrolling is mostly an unpleasant activity. A lot of people, especially young people, do not like social media. Perhaps it's this passive consumption that is the problem. So maybe make Friendster more about creating than consuming.

It was outcompeted two decades ago. Friendster, Google+, Orkut… they were all outcompeted by the Facebook juggernaut, and even that has become stale in absence of real competition as younger generations have migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and others.

Friendster was early to the game but it died, and it died for a reason. Let it rest.

You're assuming it has to be the same Friendster that it was back then.

No, I’m assuming that social networking follows Metcalfe’s Law, and that there’s no real way to migrate users en masse, so there’s no incentive to migrate individually if there’s nobody you know there to network with.

Incorrect in the reason, but they did succumb for another reason which hasn't changed, so correct sentiment.

You can't compete against companies that don't have a loss function constraint on their business.

I didn’t really give a reason why I think Friendster died, so how can I be wrong about it?

You gave a reason.

> It was outcompeted two decades ago.

Fair enough. I guess that’s a kind of reason. I’d be satisfied with a reason if it specified how it had been outcompeted, and speaking personally from somebody who lived through the era it was kind of clunky and at least when I used it there was no notion of ‘networks’ (that Facebook initially had, and then retired probably more than a decade ago) or ‘groups’ — I have memories of user accounts named after organisations or common interests with lots of ‘friends’ linking to them… and also the notion of user ‘walls’ and status updates was very embryonic. My girlfriend at the time was utterly engrossed but really it failed to draw me in. Facebook a few years later however was like a syringe of blue dopamine straight to the brain.

I think “addictive” is necessary in the sense that if it is not behaviorally reinforcing it will not grow, not be sustainable. If I was starting a social network I’d look at Chinese mobile games like Azur Lane in how they set up a network of ‘events’ and accomplishments that always give you a reason to play.

“Negative” is something else that can be addressed directly. To make a fact-checking machine you have to make a god, but to detect outrage and negativity you just need ModernBERT, BiLSTM and maybe 20,000 training examples. It is true that outrage engages people but take that away and you will find there are wholesome things like cat photos that go viral. How you suppress negativity is up to you, and people will always say that their negativity is their free speech, but detecting negativity in 2005 is mostly a matter of making the training set.

Thank you for the feedback. I don't want it to grow just by making it addictive. I'd rather it be a great product. I have faith that if it is a great product and helps people, then people will want to use it. I'd rather people use it because it helps them make friends or keep in touch with friends, or something positive like this.

I disagree with this definition of "addictive"...not all behaviors that are self-reinforcing are simply 'addictive'. Is drinking water addictive by your definition?

Event organization and birthday reminders are basically all that’s needed. I hear so many people bemoan the loss of Facebook of old for those two features.

Beyond that, I’m not even sure if being able to post things is worth it. Status updates such as relationship status and job might be worth it. But text content? Hmm. I fear it devolves into politics and other low quality discussion quickly. The modern Facebook brings out the worst in some of the best people I know. Sometimes we shouldn’t share our opinions so freely until we’ve thought about them more and refined them.

I guess that’s what made Google+ interesting. Knowing that you were posting to a specific circle, you could post more relevant content.

Did you also buy the Copyright from MOL Global?

It would seem on first glance that you can't set up a social network called Friendster just because you bought Friendster.com domain.

I own the trademark for Friendster

That's super cool - I'd be interested to hear more about that if you chose to write about it.

I'd really love to see the combination of all the good things of social media coming together.

Groups with voting like Reddit. Sub groups like Discord. Friend feeds like old Facebook. IM like Discord. A disappearing posts feature like Instagram/Snapchat. Events and things to do in certain areas like S'More. A revamped phpBB forum style in groups. Etc.

And good monetization practices, e.g. selling ad space on groups or on keyword searches.

Social Media is a tough nut to crack but meetup.com is a crock of crap. Something to replace that and make new friends would be interesting.

Meetup is a testament to the extent one can polish a turd. They've put so much effort into aesthetics and yet their app/site is so slow and fails in random ways.

Meetup essentially had a monopoly, you could go to a new city or foreign country and immediately connect with likeminded people. I guess it wasn't profitable enough to pay off their VC so they kept changing it and adding dumb "features" and raising the price... and now it's basically useless.

It's owned by Bending Spoons now. Unclear if there's anyone working on it anymore beyond keeping it running.

I would use a better version of meetup. I use the current version....

On the same tack, maybe a simplified LinkedIn. Keep track of good work connections without being tied to work emails. LinkedIn is unusable...

I would suggest putting an emphasis on people being able to form social circles and clubs.

Also, if you ever end up hiring engineers, I might be interested!

I have an idea to throw in the pile. I am part of a small group of people from various parts of the country that meet up on zoom, using a link that the founder of the group got from their university that they don't even go to anymore. We primarily play Jackbox games with the occasional Among Us round.

Maybe you could help facilitate activities like this on the new Friendster?

An idea I had is organizing week-ends in big houses with maybe 30 strangers of similar age. You make them have a great time, and afterwards you invite them to indicate the people they really liked. Over time you can make them see each other again and maybe do some recommendation engine to guess who in the community they will like but still haven't met.

I don't know, but good luck. When I think of social networks that have stuck...

FB - incredibly local first market.

Instagram, YouTube & TikTok - key tech insight that photos / video were the dominant medium of their time, combined with great timing and user experience.

iMessage - built in distribution, and the good fortune that no product manager thought it was a social network for at least a few years.

BlueSky - basically just great timing and willingness to fully copy Twitter.

I think it's too early on VR social, and the giants are too focused on it. I do think that hyper-private photo sharing is interesting. I want to send photos of my kids to my parents daily, grandparents monthly, and in laws every couple weeks. The current set up for messaging is a little clunky.

> BlueSky - basically just great timing and willingness to fully copy Twitter.

Don't think it is just a copy. It is same UX that keep the familiarity factor to Twitter but then you can also run your own PDS and own your data. There is a lot more curated feeds and that makes it even more interesting.

I was going to suggest turning friendster.com into a fullstack atproto-based app. Maybe just fork Bluesky's social app, as others are doing, and rebrand it as Friendster.

For me it’s a copy. But I’m glad you’re getting some extra benefit! I’m just glad it exists.

I like the hyper private photo sharing.

Use it to promote making friends in person. Perhaps a curated and editable list of actual 3rd spaces in the real world. All anonymous users (like HN), popular 3rd spaces can be voted up/down per city/town. Maybe each venue could include posts for meet times or events.

Ban any corporations or companies from making a page on it, only real people. Vet everyone and no AI bots. Kick out and ban people who are not good with the community. Just like any community, have people vouch for each other. No promoting, no ads.

100% this. Regarding the vetting part: The bluesky waitlist/invite system was a bit extreme but a karma system which prevents posting before reaching a certain level (some subreddits and hacker news does this) could also improve the quality of conversation Also, over time we have seen how advertising really skews the quality of social platforms, so I’d challenge you to come up with other forms of monetization, which could be donation or subscription based, or perhaps points based rewards like Bamboo’s maker hub.

I’m not a huge fan of how AI generated content can pollute social media, but using it for moderation could be useful, such as detecting company pages, spam and other harmful content.

I had some ideas around QR codes on business cards. The concept was you have to actually meet someone in real-life and then the friend you just met scans the QR code and your in the same network; QR code could be purely digital of course, but physical cards are nice.

What's great with friendster back then is we can express who we are through themes or html snippets. We can insert musics, videos, or even flash games. I think that points are missing on today's social media.

What's great with friendster back then is we can express who we are through themes or html snippets. We can insert musics, videos, or even flash games. I think that points are missing on today's social media.

Make it decentralized. You could implements atproto protocol by bluesky you could get some traction with publicity. Oh and by the way stay clear off anything hinting your political leaning (Make 'something' great again?).

yes I've been thinking about making it decentralized - am seriously considering using nostr for this

You should start by thinking federated to make it great again ! I love what bluesky is doing. You can either go that route or build full compatible Activity Pub + your own layer of whatever feature you want to add on top of it.

For me personally, anything using the phrasing make ______ great again is a huge turn off. Maybe dispense with language that a lot of people might find to be divisive if your goal is to make it a positive environment.

Anti-spam and offensive content might be a challenge for small initiatives.

Gary V had a good idea on a podcast with two guys and coffee recently. Have two tabs, one feed limited to 150 friends max and the other to an interest based feed. Thought it was a good idea

Nit: the copyright year on your website is wrong (says 2024)

having a correct or incorrect copyright date actually doesn't mean much in a legal sense.

Please just make an option for people's feeds to be purely chronological. That alone would make it a step above most social media out there now.

And then that one friend makes 100 posts per day and you can't see anything else in all this noise :)

And make an option to "mute" that one friend in your feed.

You always have the option to stop being friends with manic weirdos lol

It depends on, how will it be different from Facebook/X/Insta or other such popular networking sites? The name is cool though.

That\s going to be fun. Let me know if you need any help with highload system design or other tech-related things..

Joking, but if all else fails....

Make it a Mastodon server!

I'd start by asking an ugly, but critical question: how do you intend to keep it funded?

If you don't want to allow easy enshittification, what does that site/product look like, for which users, and what is the value prop that makes that appealingAND at what scale?

I think most YC folks only think in "webscale" and not in any niche or boutique upmarket way and that acts as a forcing function for how much and how fast something scales, which in turn influences so much of the rest of what you do around that.

I don't want to suggest what Friendster ought to be, but I do think you need to decide how you want to ascertain that, and then look into the "how"

I like to think that most of my neighbors are a lot smarter and saner than the ones who have the necessary "free time" to post frequently on NextDoor. Haven't really tried to test that happy assumption. Maybe best to defer the exercise indefinitely.

speak an open protocol. ATProto, ActivityPub, whatever, just build interop in.

- Check how and what Path.com was - to begin with you can just copy it

- Then check why it failed - can you avoid that? Or will money will not be a concern?

- To offset cost, see if you can do things like letting users share links of media, rather than you hosting it. Etc.

- Do not offer it for free (not beyond beta/alpha). That’s a sure shot way to become what you are trying not to become. And think about the geography/country before setting the price — purchasing powers are different that way. Or if not then target an income/social bracket, who will pay for it, and stick to it.

- Also, accept that — it will be a niche product - from the beginning. The masses don’t want they don’t already have and even if they’d want something else - it will be some Frankenstein or the other.

tl;dr: Making something “nice” will not be your problem. It will be how to stay financially afloat as it WILL NOT be a mass thing.

Are you willing to say what the domain cost you?

Revenue is from subscriptions or advertising?

Make it about verifying identity for email.

Hard to answer.

First: What are your real goals?

I think you should look at governance; your incentives; and the incentives that you provide to your users. The incentives should ultimately bring you (and your users) to your goals.

Personally, I'm disappointed with the "for profit" model of social networks. I think they should behave differently, either like democracies, community centers, or like a church. Specifically, decisions about "what the product is" need a lot more control from the users themselves.

I'd like to see a social network where everyone is to some extent verified. If you aren't willing to put your identity behind what you're saying then maybe keep it to yourself.

Nested comments in the style of reddit/HN are great for facilitating conversations. Part of why I left Facebook was they seem to be actively trying to hinder discussion.

Favor facts and reality over sensationalism and conspiracy BS.

No bigotry.

> If you aren't willing to put your identity behind what you're saying then maybe keep it to yourself.

I see that you've never had a stalker, someone try to "SWAT" you, etc.

I agree. Good in theory with a handful of trusted people.

It's a meme at this point, but yeah, people are allergic to the tagline.