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Show HN: Friends forever – Minimalist social network where you can't un-friend
friends!forever started in one part as a Ruby on Rails learning project and in another part as a joke. "It would be fun if you could add a friend but couldn’t delete one, huh" is what I told myself at the time. As I was developing it further, I became more fond of the idea and crystallized the concept more. For now, friends!forever is what Twitter was when it first launched (but with 1500 character limit) that focuses solely on staying in touch with people you know in real life, plus a touch of Basecamp. For me, it’s a middle ground between botnet "social" networks and the fediverse that many people still don’t get. It’s just a simple tool to keep in touch with friends and plan stuff together, nothing more.
There’s no business model, so I don’t need to collect any user’s personal data and try to sell it to anyone. Plus, it has some goodies like transparent app-level encryption, so the database contents are gibberish to an outside observer. How am I going to make money off of it? I’m not going to. This thing runs on my spite and money from my pocket.
- KomoD 3y agoI'm gonna be that guy: so if someone starts spouting racist nonsense, I have to put up with it forever?
- alxwnth 3y agoThat's a reasonable question; I did think about it at the early stages of the idea as well. Someone you believed was your best friend suddenly going off the rails is only one example of why you wouldn't want to be friends anymore. There's also "what do I do if we just drifted apart too far and now I don't care about their life?" or "What do I do if my best friend for life slept with my spouse?", etc. There are at least several possible ways to deal with it. Over the course of working on friends!forever, I could've never imagined I'd make the decisions I did and add the features I did. Yet now they seem vital and even more important than some of the original ideas I put into it. At least for now, I believe that it's best to let the concept progress naturally and make decisions about how to handle situations like that when there are more people actively using the platform.