Here’s another interesting upstart in the race to fill the void left by slowly collapsing social networks of days past.
Again, pretty close to what I’d want in my ideal social network: A way to talk to friends; paid for by users, not advertisers; transparent business model; no crazy expectations of hyper-growth.
I realize these deal-breakers make it pretty hard to build a sustainable business model around creating and running a social network.
Maybe that means capitalism isn’t the right framework within which to build a good social network.
Maybe that means the next good social network shouldn’t be a business run for profit. Maybe the motive for creating the network should be something other than money. Maybe we need something new.
Wow, a commenter on Hacker news had almost the same non-profit take that I did. And in true HN fashion, other commenters contributed helpful information, links, and suggestions.
But there are some deal-breakers for me too.
I think we really need to stop trying to centralize everyone’s personal information inside of one global-scale web app. Distributed networks are the future.
Users need to (have the option to) own their own online identities, not lease them from some gatekeeper.
When storing data in the cloud, as much of it as possible should be truly end-to-end encrypted.