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How to run a small social network (2019)
- AnonHP 3y ago> So what do you, the reader, do next? Sadly (for me), this section only lists alternatives like Mastodon and Pleroma (for Twitter), Pixelfed for Instagram and PeerTube for YouTube. What I would like to see is something like Facebook Groups, which is topic/community focused, allows anyone to post (assuming admins allow), allows anyone in the group to respond or follow, etc. Even something like Reddit may be similar. Twitter and Instagram clones are good for following a few people and occasionally interacting with them, but to me they seem cumbersome with the "one to many" nature of their networks/graphs.
- mistermegabyte 3y agoI have been digging a small, awesome site called Blue Dwarf (https://bluedwarf.top/cackle/index.php https://bluedwarf.top/cackle/index.php). It is everything you described above except I don't know if it is like Facebook groups or not because I haven't used Facebook.
- immibis 3y agoLemmy, a Reddit clone?
- homefree 3y agoNot sure if you’ve looked at urbit and the tlon app, but it’s come a long way for groups. It also doesn’t rely on a benevolent administrator like mastodon does, each user has their own urbit tied to their ID. Disclaimer that I work on it, but I think it does a better job of solving the underlying issues than federated setups like mastodon. https://tlon.io/ https://tlon.io/
- FredPret 3y agoSocial networks are platforms. They get more valuable the more people are on it. Imagine a platform with 100 people on it. Nobody's going to put effort into putting content on that. Now look at something like X, Youtube, TikTok. It's a storm of content, because that's where the eyeballs are.
- lcnmrn 3y agoYou are so wrong, check out Subreply.
- Solvency 3y agoAn exclusive golf club for billionaires is also a platform. Of around 100 people. That most people would kill to penetrate.
- playingalong 3y agoI think most of the ordinary people, myself included, wouldn't know what to tell them. What am I going to do with them? Ask them for money? Convince to invest in my idea?
- lostlogin 3y agoDiscuss golf?
- xboxnolifes 3y agoTrue. The quality of a platform is also based on the quality of the people. And your example is more of the same: perceived opportunities for money or power.
- immibis 3y agoThe quality of the content, at least. Reddit grew by having the co-founders use sockpuppet accounts to cross-post things from other link aggregator sites.
- jonbell 3y agoYup. Weird internet never went anywhere. You’ve always been able to find bespoke, organic, locally owned, premium grade A hipster indie stuff online. It’s just not as popular to as many people.
- urbandw311er 3y agoI think this is something more akin to a small WhatsApp group. And people definitely post on those.
- musictubes 3y agoWhen app.net finally went away Dalton and Berg open sourced a fair bit of the underlying technology. Two small social networks were born for people that did not want to give up the communities they had found on app.net. PNut.io uses the same backbone that app.net did. I’m not sure about the underlying software that 10centuries.org uses. Both of them feature microblogging but also offer other features. 10centuries also allows regular blogging and pnut has private messages as well as #mondaynightdanceparty. Every monday 9:30 PM EST people log into mndp.tv and request videos. We all watch them and comment. It’s a lot of fun. Not being open to every rando on the internet does lead to a better experience.
- Throw839 3y agoStart Telegram channel. No big tech bs and very easy to run.
- fantasybroker 3y agoFor many people Telegram will never be a viable option. It has strong ties to Russia and is being run from Dubai. While maybe it's not big tech (i.e. Silicon Valley), it definitely lacks trust as an entity.
- explain 3y agoThis push for everyone to have their own empty social network site (not distinguishable from 1 billion other sites on the same code) is very strange.
- righthand 3y agoWhy? Isn’t that essentially what self hosted wordpress is? Aren’t people running the same OSes everywhere? You don’t have to visit them all and they all don’t need to be unique if they’re different sites. The push for people to all be on the same platform and a single code base run by a marketing company is the strange thing.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoMost people interested in using social networks have no interest in running a WordPress site or care/know about the details of an OS outside of the fact that it allows them to access the internet. Self-hosting a social network brings them no benefit.
- righthand 3y agoOkay then they can use a non-self hosted service then. Doesn’t mean that getting people off singularly owned and operated marketing platforms is a bad idea or a strange concept.
- jddj 3y agoThe alternative is more strange. In Europe not too long ago my partner and I called in to an undergroundish bar of the kind we used to frequent when we were younger for a beer on the way back from dinner. It's the sort of place where people write on the walls, and I couldn't help but notice how many instagram tags there were. Properly articulating why I felt like it was a shame that the one thing a lot of these young adults wanted to share was a link to their little ad-gated corner of a big tech company's garden would probably need more space than I've got here. There's even an "opt in to tracking or pay" ultimatum on Instagram there.
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- denysvitali 3y agoShameless plug: https://rings.social https://rings.social (GPLv3) is my attempt to build a Reddit-like social network. This is my second attempt after OpenDolphin [1] (demo [2]), but the problem remains the same: finding a good amount of people to bootstrap the social network. [1]: https://about.opendolphin.social/ https://about.opendolphin.social/ [2]: https://app.opendolphin.social/ https://app.opendolphin.social/
- immibis 3y agoIf you make it Lemmy-compatible, you don't need other people to be on your server.
- martinrue 3y agoAnother shameless plug: I created the first social network for Gemini and have been running that for a couple of years now: https://martinrue.com/station https://martinrue.com/station
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- INTPenis 3y agoWith all the shameless plugs in the comments, anyone know of a social media network that focuses on following topics instead of individuals? I'm talking about reddit back when it was still good. You follow interesting topics, celebrities can have their own topic, but you cannot follow everything an individual user does. Following everything an individual does is kinda creepy to me, I feel like we've taken a wrong turn there with social media.
- janandonly 3y agoStacker.news tries to be a new reddit of sorts.
- yawgmoth 3y agoYou can follow hashtags on the Fedi, and some accounts are "groups". Feels like mailing lists.
- fantasybroker 3y agoI don't use that, but AFAIK on most existing social networks you can follow tags instead of users.
- INTPenis 3y agoYou can yes, but they're also primarily focused on following users. Can you disable that part? I'm no ActivityPub expert but I'd want a software that does not publish individual user actions to activitystreams, only if they're done on a topic. And then you can only be notified of the action if you subscribe to the topic. Kinda exactly like how reddit works but without the option to follow user accounts, that came much later.
- fantasybroker 3y agoThe only thing I can think of is hosting your own ActivityPub server (e.g. Mastodon) and customizing the theme. Maybe that's the future of more individually-tailored online experiences.
- a1o 3y ago> It behaves just like Mastodon with one important change: the only letter you are allowed to use is "E". I loved this, this indeed is what open source is about!
- bee_rider 3y agoE’e eee eeee E eeee ee.
- derwiki 3y agoI run a Slack server with about 80 people, maybe a quarter are regularly active. Is that a social network? I’m not on FB, Instagram, X, etc so it feels like my only social network.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago> I think a good CoC should be specific enough that it is actively repulsive to some people. And frankly, the more people who are repulsed by it the better. I'd say that in this case, the best version is the one that names explicitly people who are allowed and others need not apply. But then again... It's actually an interesting train of thought. How should I repulse, in one simple sentence, both right-wing and left-wing nutsoes? How can I make sure the result of this repellent is not an empty set? But then again, maybe only the nuttiest ones should be repelled, and the rest will read the room...
- immibis 3y agoYou could try "Free speech, but don't be a dick". Let-wing nutsoes will be repelled because they think you're right wing because you said "free speech", and right-wing nutsoes will be banned because they want to be dicks.
- spencerflem 3y agoI don't think the contents of the CoC are as important as the content of the site. Left wing people dont hate free speech, they hate seeing posts by right wing people (often attacking them) and dont want to be in that space. And the same is true for right wing people, look at how censored Truth Social is. You want the vibes of the space to be comfortable for the people you want to attract. As for the CoC wording, hackernews's is pretty good for a well moderated high profile site with a specific vision: posts should be curious, don't be mean, etc.
- immibis 3y agoThe question was about repelling "left-wing nutsoes", not normal left-wing people.
- spencerflem 3y agoI stand by that nutsos of any denomination aren't likely to be reading your CoC closely, and that the main use of one is to make your moderation more justifiable.
- analyte123 3y agoHas everyone forgotten about phpbb? (Or whatever the slightly more modern forum software is…) Historically forums are the most successful small social networks.
- fantasybroker 3y agoNot sure what your experience is, for me forums still work great but they have transitioned from general social hangouts to very specialized niche communities. I don't mind that and still get a lot of value from e.g. music production forums like Mod Wiggler and Gearspace. However, other than HN I don't frequent any other small-ish communities where conversations can go outside of the stated purpose.
- immibis 3y agoRecently I've seen "small web" sites referred to generically as "tildes", despite some sites trying to claim that name for themselves (e.g. tildes.net).
- brabel 3y agoThe tilde (~) has been used as a prefix for usernames on multi-user UNIX systems for a very long time. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/423962/what-is-a-tilde-when-used-as-a-prefix-to-a-path https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/423962/what-is-a-ti... In fact, I believe some of these small websites are just UNIX systems that allow the public to have accounts in them.
- 7moose 3y agoA Discord server seems to meet many of my “small social network” needs. The hacker spirit of this post is fun but it can be hard to get friends to value it as much as the person running it might.
- andai 3y agoThe article mentions "your job is social first, technical second" but seems to focus mostly on the technical aspects. Was hoping to find more advice for the social aspects. Created a tiny Discord for some friends and have been wondering what I can do to make it worth spending time on (specifically, how do I make it more interesting than all the other servers they could be spending time on--if I just copy what I've seen works, then I'll probably just have the same thing with less activity). Worth mentioning my specific intention was to foster the sort of high quality discussion that is possibly unique to this website. So I guess I'm wondering if HN's recipe can be replicated, and what's the secret sauce. Strong rules and moderation? But the culture seems to play a big role too.
- apantel 3y agoIt’s funny how even a tiny project like this gives rise to the question “How do we boost engagement?”
- redcobra762 3y agoThe secret to HN is YCombinator, so I guess fund a wildly successful startup accelerator and get the people orbiting those startups to participate.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoErr, if your friends don't want to chat with you, I don't think there's much you can do. Maybe they're just busy? Or maybe you'd be better off doing other activities with them (multiplayer games etc) if you want to hang out.
- CrazyStat 3y agoSeconded. I have a friend group from college that moved from a Facebook group (due to several people quitting facebook) through a couple different services before settling on Discord. When we were initially discussing moving off Facebook I looked at self-hosted options, including mastodon, but we explicitly did not want federation—just a private group for us.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2019)
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion: Then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSince fediverse has become much more of a thing since 2019, there are more recent resources on setting up your own Like Paul Stamatiou's extensive Hosting your own Mastodon server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36761283
- Podgajski 3y agoI run a small social network with absolutely no technology at all. Usually consists of six or seven of us sitting in a coffee shop or a bar. It was never broke so stop trying to fix it.
- jjice 3y agoI envy the consistency you have to seemingly get a large group of you folks regularly. Any tips that make it possible for y'all to schedule this?
- leviathant 3y agoWhen I was in a band, someone in the group said "Practice is on Tuesday and on Saturday" and we all stuck to it for a few years. Sometimes we'd even get together on a weekday to play a show, where even more people would show up. It helps to have a reason to get together. At a certain point early in life, I think most people adopt a "no agenda, no attenda" attitude towards socializing.
- ethbr1 3y ago> "no agenda, no attenda" attitude towards socializing As the proverbial people-networking advice goes, "What is the person whose time I'm asking for getting out of meeting? And what can I give them? And how can I make that a win/win?" Folks have an aversion to spending limited time to show up and hope something happens. Better to make the something explicit.
- izzydata 3y agoThat feels sociopathic in the context of socializing. As if you need to have something to gain in order to bother spending time with people.
- ethbr1 3y agoHow often do we plan to spend time without getting something? That might be fun, catching up, sexual attraction, familial obligation, or religious duty... but it's something. Better to be intentional and up-front when asking others, rather than expecting a reason to materialize out of the ether (and them to agree to spend the time without knowing it).
- dang 3y agoRelated: How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470565 - Dec 2021 (209 comments) How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604023 - Sept 2021 (1 comment) How to run a small social network site for your friends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384970 - July 2019 (60 comments)
- j45 3y agoIt might be neat if upon re-submission every few years, the system auto-pins these. They are all valuable including the current view to see how it might change/evolve. I'll have to look into HN's experience with helpful bots in the past (or not)
- nvr219 3y agoWe have a group that solves this problem with a free tier slack instance.
- 1905 3y agoStep 1: Create thousands of fake accounts and create active daily engagement among users
- dimkr1 3y agoThis is my attempt to tick all boxes. Small codebase, two languages (Go and SQL), easy deployment and no frameworks/ORMs, ActivityPub support and a lightweight text-based interface. https://github.com/dimkr/tootik https://github.com/dimkr/tootik
- philip1209 3y agoI've been building something that could be described as a "professional social network SaaS" [1]. Most of the users are VC funds that connect founders in a network. I think the thing that is most under-appreciated is keeping people engaged over time. Facebook kept people coming back because it was the universal network. As social media fragments, people assume that others will just stick around in a Discord/Slack/Circle/etc. But, the reality is that ~75% of people stop returning after a month. And, most social networks see that 90% of members read instead of engage - so the format needs to work for people who prefer to just read. I solve this in my product by sending a email summary every day to keep people informed. My opinion is that the defining characteristic of any social network software is how it keeps people engaged over time - whether it's email newsletter, SMS, push notifications, or desktop pop-ups. The time and place people see notifications is closely related to the network audience, and how notifications work as audience size scales matters. A software that assumes that people will just remember to come back without reminders is going to taper off slowly in engagement. We'll never have another universal social network like Facebook in 2010. So, as networks splinter - think about when and how often people need to engage, and work backwards on the software from those needs. [1] https://booklet.group https://booklet.group