danfang

Yeah I totally see this trend too. I think there's a reasonable hybrid model between private group chats and traditional social networking (i.e. photo albums, events, payments, posts, etc).

In fact, I've been working on this idea for a while now and just launched on HN a few hours ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933272. It's definitely a response to current trends of people leaving social media due to negative effects on social and mental health. I saw this happening to my friend groups first hand and knew something had to change.

I started building out the product in early July, so it's been about two full months of work.

I recently quit my full time job as a software engineer because I really believe this problem requires my full engagement and devotion!

Hey HN,

I'm Daniel, founder of Thread.

I started Thread two months ago because I believe current social media and social networks are built in a way that harms our ability to meaningfully connect with one another. They're highly addictive, superficial, and socially isolating. They also run a reputation of violating user privacy and selling it to third parties.

I strongly believe in ad-free, private social networking as an alternative. It's all about building and maintaining relationships with the people closest to you. If this sounds interesting, please try out the app! It's still very early, beta software.

On pricing: I think advertising is out of the question. It's a strong misalignment of incentives in trying to deliver long term value for end users. I have some ideas here, but the most obvious thing that comes to mind is a subscription based service (say ~$10/year).

I would love to hear your feedback (questions, comments, suggestions) on what I'm building.

Reach out to me personally at daniel@thread-app.com.

I'd imagine you can already do that with some basic web scraping tools. This definitely makes it easier.

Love this XKCD. My response, as it might apply to what I'm working on, is that I don't just want to build a new messaging standard. It has to be radically better than alternatives to be sticky.

Yeah, I figured it was. I'm quite open to a name change (http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html). I have some ideas in mind. Thread is temporary at the moment.

I don't know if this is too self promoting, but I'm part of the YC SUS 2019 program and I'm building a product that addresses the issue of messaging lock in, as well as data privacy.

I'm building Thread - an ad-free, private social network for groups. It's an alternative to Facebook (Messenger and WhatsApp), iMessage and GroupMe. It's the best way to connect with, share content to, and interact with the people in your life.

It's a limited release right now (still in alpha), but please sign up and check it out at https://thread-app.com/register. EDIT: it only is available on desktop web at the moment to US based users. Anything else will most likely give you an error.

E2E encryption is something we are considering building. Right now, the promise is no-ads, no front-end tracking, and no selling data to third parties.

Happy to chat more about it and answer any questions (maybe this isn't an appropriate place for that discussion).

No. [1,2,3].reject! { |x| x == 1 } would give you [3,2], rearranging the order of elements. It would work for sets.

Hmmm, I never really thought of it like finger - that's a good analogy! I think there is potential for many other use cases rather than just for others viewing information about you though.

Hey, this is really cool! There are a couple of key differences between the two services (mine doesn't aim to be a service), but I see a lot of common themes as well. I'll definitely keep track of Servant in the coming months.

Hey Junto, it's a completely open schema as of right now. Feel free to add whatever fields you wish and render them as you will! What I have is just a template that works for me - think of me.json kind of like json-server, but all about you.

I saw that and was glad that people supported a similar idea. I think this is better though - it opens up that portal for everyone. It also opens it up in a way that people in the open source community can build on it (extra modules that is).

I think getting to be the authority on your information would be awesome. If people hooked into your API instead of vice versa, you rarely have to update your information in more than one place. Address changes, place of work, DOB (?) - maybe these could all be achieved through an API for yourself.

There's a possibility for analytics that pulls data from all sources instead of just once (health analytics, IoT data).

There's a possibility for communication -- instead of email, maybe people could communicate through these endpoints.

All of these are just stubs of ideas, but you have a very good point. The largest use case is probably in visually representing your online data.

Hey guys! Thanks for checking out my little project.

Some background info: I was reflecting the other day on just how proprietary our online information seems. Maybe not proprietary, but definitely disjointed. We go to Twitter for social blurbs and trends, we go to Facebook to see our friends, Pinterest to see our interests, Github to see our code, etc etc.

I thought there was a big gap in getting access control to this information and that there are extremely powerful ways we can leverage all of this information. This essentially bootstraps the entire process of going through each social network's API and puts it in your hands. I think some interesting interfaces could come out of such an idea, although I'm not sure how well my implementation has allowed for that.

All in all, please give your feedback. I want to know areas where this is lacking, where you might see hidden opportunities - any reflection is appreciated!