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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Love the idea. We've got kids and try to keep their likenesses off the public / data-slurping internet (Google, FB/WA/Insta, etc) by sending photos to friends and family via Signal.

The downside is that everything's ephemeral. I've long thought there was room for a private network where you can pub/sub to people you care about. Sort of a simple and private Livejournal / Blogger.

FWIW I think the self-hosting bit isn't where the opportunity is. It's in hosted private sharing. One thing I'd do is create landing pages for people who want to share privately and have $$. Parents are the first group that comes to mind.

I wish you success - the world needs what you're doing!

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I mean... if you don't want to self-host, what's the actual difference between your service and Google Photos then?

You're still giving photos to someone else with a pinky swear they won't do share them further.

Presumably the contents of the privacy policy would be different.

Google doesn't give you a pinky-swear that they won't do anything further with the images.

But an anonymous person on HN is perfectly trustworthy?

I didn't say that. I said "presumably their privacy policies would be different".

If their service's privacy policy isn't materially different, then I wouldn't trust it. If their service's privacy policy materially restricts how they can use the data in ways that Google's would otherwise allow, then I would put more trust in it.

If setup correctly, the hosting provider ought to be incapable of decrypting the photos.

You're right. This is a trust issue that's difficult to reason about. I'd like to encourage people to self-host as much as possible and I plan to be as open as possible about how I'll do hosting. Paid hosting means the revenue model is clear--there isn't a need to sell data to keep the lights on. I'm also using the same AWS deployment process for paid hosting as I make available in the open source repository--so every Haven gets its own dedicated EC2 instance, with a database installed right on that instance. This makes broad querying of everybody's data much harder.

I think my biggest fear is that that this idea takes off, but some competitor makes a free offering by selling data and including ad targeting and most users don't know the difference.

I don’t think you have anything to fear. The reason people would buy is privacy. If someone gives it away for free they are the product and their privacy is at risk.

Plus the market is enormous. Probably room for a handful of good sized competitors.

Incentives, law and outside attestation.

Google gives you a lot of things for "free". I trust someone who I pay $9/mo to if they promise to not share my photos. If they share my photos, they'll stop getting my $9/mo.

Legally, the host can include protections for your data including not reselling or sharing your data even in cases of acquisition. If it's in the contract with the host, it's binding both ways.

Third, by allowing audits. There's a cost here and auditors are still human, but they provide outside assurance - especially when their findings are published independently.

well I pay Google to host my photos. You must not have many photos if you can fit them all in Google's free tier, but you could always buy extra storage just to make the revenue model clear and all that.

You're paying google very little for the amount of space you're getting. I assure you, your very cheap cloud storage is being subsidized. [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21559930/google-train-ai...

>We've got kids and try to keep their likenesses off the public / data-slurping internet (Google, FB/WA/Insta, etc) by sending photos to friends and family via Signal.

We use Tinybeans for this

Yeah, there's loads of these. We used to use BackThen which used to be called something else, got bought by Canon and then sold back to the founders. It's decent enough, but now I just use iCloud shared photo albums as none of the people I share with use Android.

This is possible in the Fediverse. For example Mastodon lets you approve your followers manually and post so that only followers can see.

There's value in making private only and anything you post is seen by followers the default case. Mostly when marketing: if I don't ever want to publish publicly a landing page that says this:

> Haven is about sharing privately with friends and family. There is no option to make your blog public to the world. You get to create an account for anyone you want to have access.

Is more compelling than one where grandparents have to register, find my blog, I have to approve them, and for every post I have to set permissions levels.

Someone has already suggested mastadon, but I think Scuttlebutt is a much better solution for what you want. Totally decentralized, persistent, no need for a hosted server. You can set it up in a few minutes and if you're only using it for your small group there's no need to connect to anyone else.

The problem is that SSB isn’t really private. Anything you share in an offline circle of friends becomes public if any member of the group ever connects to a pub server. There is encrypted messaging, but IIRC last time I tried to use it, the threads maxed out at eight people in the client. There are seven people in my immediate family, so I hit limits very quickly.

You can make your own private network that is cryptographically unable to replicate with other networks (like the main net), but I don't think you should ask close friends and family to edit ~/.ssb/config to add a custom SHS key.

As much as I've loved working on Scuttlebutt, I can't recommend using it for this use-case.

Try: Cocoon.com

It's pricy at $40 per year, but seems to hit all the marks.

I suggest you make a private Telegram group. Everything is synced across all members and devices, photos and videos are stored in full resolution. You can hop into the group's voice chat any time.

Movim sits on top of XMPP, which handles a lot of these already https://movim.eu/

It's also federated, so people not using your instance can still interact from where they are

> long thought there was room for a private network

MyFamily.com was essentially this in the pre Facebook era. IIRC there was a modest annual fee for a private site/feed that let you share posts, photos, and recipes with family members.

Facebook and Instagram both let you do this, that's how I use them. All my information is private and only shared with my direct followers that I've approved.

What's different about what you envision then that?

Facebook and Instagram are using your contact list for their purposes and running their algorithms on all your photos for their purposes.

ActivityPub / Mastadon maybe or just a good old RSS feed.

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