Apart from this app, I'm confused how proudly this guy presents his sleazy domain-squatting shenanigans. It seems to me, setting this friendster site apart, these people are the parasites of the internet. This whole domain name business is a corrupt stinking pile of crap. Why are we tolerating this?
For this friendster app, I think we can be certain, if it has any success, it will become the same crap we already have, given where this dude stands.
Considering how little is actually interesting about the app aside from it using an old domain, my impression is that the entire post is just pseudo-marketing, attempting to encourage people to get back into domain name squatting.
IIUC it's not the model of buying domains from registrars which stinks of crap, it's the buying from registrars by domain squatters who then flip them for a profit having provided zero value that bears a whiff of shite. These ticket scalpers of the internet who contribute nothing can well and truly fuck straight off.
> He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin.
> So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.
I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)?
I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.
You are absolutely right and that jumped out at me. I should also point out the obvious: if people were selling online assets making $9k/year for $9k, there would be a line out the door of people lining up to buy them. If anyone here is selling an asset that makes $X a year for $X, I'll buy it! I make my money back in 12 months and everything else is profit.
So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.
So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."
[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]
Yeah, but you have to scale the projections for uncertainty about the future, and exaggeration by the seller.
In particular, if someone on the internet tells me they’re making $x a month from spammy ads on a squatted domain, I immediately discount the claim substantially due to bullshit. I increase the discount rate if the person making the claim is trying to sell me said domain.
True, but if the guy contacting you is the actual owner of the website you use to buy domains, his credibility increases enormously. He said this person was a customer on his platform. When that guy says "I have a website which is making 10k/year," and I already trust the domain platform he created because I use it as a customer, I believe him.
If you had a steady investment opportunity with 10% return (about in line with long-terms stock market returns), $9000 per year indefinitely is worth the same as $99000 now (in an idealized finance world. In the real world you can't invest $99000 and withdraw $9000 per year because withdrawals during downturns will take out too much. But it's a quick way to calculate equivalent values).
That's obviously an upper bound, because those domains won't make $9000/year forever. But valuing them at $10k if they make $9k/year is equally unsound. Not to mention the domain is worth more than its ad revenue. You could also end up selling it to a company that came up with the name and saw that the domain is available for purchase for some reasonable 4-5 figure amount (like in the example of this very article, where someone buys a domain for a five-figure amount)
Obviously there is a lot we don't know (is the $9k pure profit or are there substantial costs? How likely is the domain to sell?), but it sounds like the seller got the better end of the deal. He got more than $40k in value, in return the author got a deal he could afford
Good analysis. if I was the author I would have just borrowed 20k in a personal loan and paid it off in three years. Of course he may be exaggerating that he gets 9K in Ad revenue per year or he knows that it's going to decline
Yes this is what im confused about. They described it as a parking domain, but the old strategy of "buy a popular domain and put ads on a one pager" hasn't been something that pays substantively for a long time. Ads sales have plummeted in general but not being able to use adsense would make it worse.
I imagine that $9k ad revenue is a site that had an actual user base. And that the guy taking over the domain is going to just put all ads and no content, like he had on Friendster.com. And if so, the expected ad income is probably much lower.
...unless there's considerable uncertainty about future payments. Happily for the sellers of dubious assets, the world never seems to run out of people who can't resist a deal that's too good to be true.
From what I can tell, The upper bound on price for any site making less than 100k a month is 24 months of revenue, but the more common is around 12 months.
The buyer takes on substantial risk because it's easy to fake the numbers, and google updates can tank the site at any time.
Also, most sites will require maintenance/upkeep to keep earning, or they can tank quick. Even if they have got evergreen content, without updates google might drop their search ranking.
it's been a few years since I looked into it, but the 12x-24x was the range I saw for sites that actually sold. I guess it might have changed since then.
They said “a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue”, not “a domain that was making about $9k/year in profits”.
Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.
>Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular.
That's not investment, that's just the cost of upkeep. It's possible you simply cannot afford to keep up with that expense rate, but the fact remains that it's net profit. With a $100k investment and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you lost $91k. With a yearly $100k cost and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you earned $9k. No matter how you slice it it's a money-printing machine. The question is much it cost you to buy the machine, not how much it costs you to run it, because you'd be a fool to turn it off.
You can check out similar sales on flippa.com - ad revenue does not last forever, even if it’s existed for years. And revenue is very much not profit, you could create a site and get $100/day in ad revenue tomorrow but it would cost you $200 in ad spend.
I tried to search for Friendster in the App Store and didn’t see it among the first few results. Instead, App Store was returning a sponsored ad followed by normal results for all other kinds of similar annd less similar apps. Instagram, Snapchat, Yubo (never heard of), Monopoly Go (mobile game related to the board game Monopoly), BeFriend (never heard of), Tinder, Friendly Social Browser (never heard of), Facebook, and at that point I stopped scrolling the results.
For a moment I thought maybe the app was US exclusive or something and not available in my region.
But following the link from the post worked fine and I could install it.
I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
Anyway, installed the app finally thanks to the link.
When a new app is released, it takes a few days for it to get into search, for some reason. Pretty much every single time a new app releases I see a comment like this. Nothing malicious you just have to wait a bit.
The first result is a sponsored result, and even after Friendster is indexed, if they don't pay apple's extortion-rate, the first result will still be for some other social media app.
Ads in the app store are malicious. There are people who have searched "Ledger bitcoin wallet", clicked the first link (a malicious app who paid apple enough money to be 'sponsored' for that search), and had all their money stolen.
I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.
My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.
nobody has ever claimed that apple makes great cloud software, but all of their walled garden gate-keeping aside, they’re still the last bastion of mainstream local-first computing
Yeah, sure. How do I sync my iCloud photos to my local NAS on linux? A: use a third-party app, they don't build their own.
How do I build an app for my iPhone locally and run it without ever connecting to their servers? I can do that for my phone running linux or for my phone running android, but on iOS I have to get signed by their servers to run code I wrote.
Linux respects my freedom to have my data exist locally, to build and run open source apps, and to modify the code on the devices I run.
Apple does not. They don't let me use their ecosystem from Linux, they do not let me patch the iOS kernel and run a modified version on the devices I run, I can't even access the source code for the macOS kernel.
Apple's filesystem abstraction and lack of something like android "intents" also makes it wildly difficult to do "local-first" computing where files are shared between apps cleanly.
You missed the "mainstream" qualifier from the parent. I am afraid nothing you described here could be considered mainstream, although I'd like to see these things becoming mainstream.
> I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
App Store search is fucked. Hilariously, Apple is at least non-discriminatory - try searching for any Apple app, and they will also be (at best) in the second slot after "sponsored" crap.
The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.
Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site
If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.
See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app.
Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.
Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.
If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.
(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)
It also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them. That sounds useful.
There's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.
I’m not convinced that’s the case. A relatively small subset of bad actors can join the network, create new accounts on a second phone, tap (or find a way to fake that process via the API), then eventually use those accounts from bots.
It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated
Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass.
Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.
It's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100.
But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004.
The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.
> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing
Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO
You're right. I don't think I could continue living if one of my friends died and a I could no longer view their social media profile on a site designed to foster in person connections. I really can't think many things worse than this.
You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.
Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.
As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.
While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort.
Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?
I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles.
But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted?
And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?
I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.
It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely
I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.
I shouldn't require international travel - over an ocean - to talk to my siblings on the internet on a social app.
Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work.
Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.
It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you.
For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.
People just shouldn't look to the online digital world for connection with dead loved ones. It's entirely impractical and one day after a bankruptcy or when it's no longer profitable it may just disappear. It can take years or weeks.
1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA.
2. Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
3. Save yourself a lot of money by building it on top of the Nostr protocol. Run a relay yourself if you want guaranteed reliability. Run a Blossom server for media. Use email for auth and store people's keys for them if you want a traditional UX. Don't worry about what's on Nostr already, just build your own thing on the protocol.
Let people come and go as they please and don't lock them in. They will love you for it later.
> Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
I’ve worked on a platform for social media apps. When the social network had a native iOS app, a native Android app, and a PWA, users chose iOS about two thirds of the time, Android about a quarter of the time, and PWA about 10% of the time. That’s across all users, including desktop, so the PWA actually had an unfair advantage.
People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs, especially for social media.
Such a conclusion cannot reasonably be made from the data you have presented. It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.
Yes, of course some people will feel that way, but also having less friction is not always necessarily a good thing because it requires less of a time investment for the user to get started, so therefore they are actually more likely to just churn. It is a balance
Granted, there's a lot of crap apps out there. But properly built apps are a world apart from your typical PWA's or web sites (or even really good ones)
We’re not normies, so take that with a grain of salt. Here’s mine: apps have access to significantly expanded capabilities which has privacy implications. If I can use the browser for a given app, I do it. Amazon for example.
As a native app writer, this has been my experience.
Mentioning it here, though, tends to get pushback from folks that write Web apps. They don’t want to admit that native apps have more capabilities than Web apps; even if that’s a bad thing, because of security risks.
People say PWAs are good as apps now and feels like an app now, personally as ab armchair nobody I doubt the retention rate actually compare, even if the app was literally just a plain WebView.
Personally I'll only install FOSS apps on my phone and I go out of my way to actively discourage (to varying degrees of success) my relatives from installing arbitrary junk that they surely don't need on their phones.
If one is going through the hassle of joining a video call on a different device to then scan it with their smartphone, all to just connect with another person, you could reasonably assume that they're friends.
Maybe if there's a "celebrity" that displays it on a live stream, that's a bigger issue, but there could be other mechanisms to dissuade this behaviour. Perhaps you could only add one friend with one QR code.
This looks exactly like what I've been looking for. I love the idea of using phone proximity as the only way to add friends.
I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge.
Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?
What I was describing is a way to quickly onboard a friend who I want to friend, because chances are zero of my friends will have this app yet.
If the connect with friend interface also had a QR code for app download and could trigger a connection between our accounts upon download, that would remove enough friction that I could start recommending this to my friends on the fly.
Accelerometer, by putting the two phones together and shaking (some app used to do this, but I can't find it with a quick search). Edit: I might have been thinking of Bump, mentioned downthread, though it's a different physical mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
Camera, and point it at their changing screen (or both at the same scene at the same moment). Not too intrusive.
GPS, but that would require location permission. Intrusive.
Audio, but that would require allowing microphone. Intrusive.
slightly OT but the technology behind Bump was genuinely mindblowing at the time. Phones didn't have NFC or anything like that, and they didn't use much accuracy in the way of location data, so they basically just had a general "city block" location, timestamp, and accelerometer readings and would invert the accelerometer reading and look for identical accel + timestamp.
We tested it one time with like 10 phones and everyone bumping each other / the wall as a control, in the same room and it nailed every actual pairing and ignored the others. The wiki has more, but lacks the subjective experience of how magic it was.
> You’d have to be specifically watching the domain friendster.com at the right time to find and participate in the auction, or you’d have to actively watch gname.com daily to see this auction.
You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
> You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
I looked into this a while ago and I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds of these services and even ones you can host yourself. No idea how well they work though.
> Fading connections. If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online.
I have this guy whom I used to be in touch with but now we meet every seven years randomly - happened two times already in completely different places and we're due for a meeting this year.
I would rather maintain this connection, because it's always fascinating to catch up after years.
> the usefulness of the app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users. Specifically, the app is intended for invited friends only.
Isn’t it insane that Apple refuses for an app to be listed on the App Store if it is intended to be niche? If true that’s pretty shocking
So you can't sideload apps on iOS, installing your own apps in dev mode is unnecessarily hard and restricted, and you can't release an app in the app store that is not open to the general public? So if I want to build an app just for my family, what do I do?
It’s always been true. If you want to build a limited distribution app Apple has mechanisms for private distribution which is used by companies for internal apps etc
They don’t want the App Store filled with app that can’t be used by the vast majority of people that might see and download it.
> If you want to build a limited distribution app Apple has mechanisms for private distribution which is used by companies for internal apps etc
Yeah, but that wouldn't be an option for this app obviously.
> They don’t want the App Store filled with app that can’t be used by the vast majority of people that might see and download it.
Then they should add alternative methods. Instead they are actively sabotaging such efforts, for example by the EU. Want to distribute an iOS app in the EU through the web? Yeah, as a requirement you need an app with 1m annual downloads[1] already in the AppStore before they allow you to do that. Which completely defeats the point.
Wow, the phone tap requirement, love it! And your ethics, the best part.
Constructively, of course (if you care for feedback devolving ramble-y):
Could almost see myself using a web app version of this for kicks. But can’t sign up for another network (though would be happy to link a self hosted project, if I could stumble through setup). Apps don’t feel private (Apple neglects to offer basic firewall/other features), and not sure how someone would look at me trying to get them to register somewhere… maybe the phone tap pitch is enough? (Especially if it’d allow one-tap registration for friends inviting new friends, because the phone bump allowed for some data transfer.)
Anyway, understand self hosting is ostensibly permanently destined to be unpopular but somehow feel if the pitch were “be your own network, tap the phone, use this Friendster infrastructure/instruction set to link your networks”, I’d be more tempted.
It’s almost unfair for me to say this, still registered on Meta properties… even need them for work… uhg!!! Zuck pls retire to do philanthropy & hire OP
I really wish more social networks would have a "fading connections" limit. So many social networks suffer from stale connections and networks, and these connections should expire after a year. Otherwise, it will permanently define a social network's content and editorial direction without algorithmic control. For example, Selena Gomez will always have 400million followers on Instagram, but she's socially irrelevant now. Same with other celebrities, like Kim Kardashian. If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant.
If you want a business model, require payment for long-term subscriptions or large celebrity/news accounts, but you have to overcome the network effect first. Maybe have a dozen or so permanent connections to start with, like MySpace's 8 priority friends.
I feel like that was what made Google Plus better and yet because it was Google shoving everything into Google Plus itself to force numbers… it failed. Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen. You can basically group friends under specific labels, so if you want to only share some posts / photos with family, only family will see it, wanna share posts with former and current coworkers? Have at it. Or share with multiple circles or everyone / global.
Its a damn shame Google nerfed it after forcing it on people who werent asking to be forced into it. Google Plus was a very tech heavy Social Media platform, if Google had half a brain they could have built their own serious LinkedIn alternative.
I completely agree. Circles were great. Unfortunately, they're one of the things that killed Google+. I remember reading an article from one of the creators of Google+ years and years ago. They talked about how asymmetric friending (Alice adding Bob to one of her circles didn't add Alice to any of Bob's circles) prevented the viral network effect that Facebook was able to achieve.
It's a damn shame. I feel like Google giving up on Google+ and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.
Windows Phone was so so good - it was THE phone I recommended to users who were on feature phones/non-smart phones because the UX was so simple and clean (and obvious) - with a side effect that if you HAD a smart phone before (Palm, Apple, Android, BlackBerry, the UX was contrary to what you were used to).
Windows Phone died because MS didnt do enough to build the app ecosystem, and bailed out too soon. I also feel webOS was a lost opportunity too - in some ways it was just too ambitious for the hardware of its time.
I was one of two non-MSFT I knew of that had one.. and I bought it because an MSFT employee was showing it off and I was convinced. The concept of Tiles was great and Cortana was respectable. It felt comparable to Siri and way better than Google.
I used it for a couple years until the apps I needed started disappearing due to lack of updates.
I really wish I had messed with Windows Phone when it was a thing. They were the only ones not to just ship a clone of an existing interface ASAP. But it was closed source and offered no advantages for carriers or device makers compared to Android.
WebOS needed WASM and a lot more to be successful. I think WASM/WASI is to the point that the next major platform build out can use it.
Facebook has that feature and has for many years. That is a good idea, but there are many bad ideas that negate the good ideas even when the good ones are implemented.
i think it was just poorly implemented. i didn't use the circles feature because all my friends would be in one circle and my family were all offline, but i still had to deal with it for no personal benefit
opt in probably would have been better, like just default everyone to one circle and make it obvious how to split them up after you're a bit more comfortable with the platform
they made a bunch of other obvious blunders like attempting to force real names and spread them to youtube, mandatory account linkage etc etc but i think there were probably just too many conflicting high level voices at google trying to set direction
I had a few different circles depending on if friends were interested in running, cycling, hiking or computers and then I could make posts that could be just for specific groups.
It would be easy to send a notification “you haven’t interacted with Sally in 6 months, so we’re removing her from your network. Click here to add her back” or something along those lines and nobody would be the least confused. They’d probably be annoyed often enough though.
As I understand my FB account, I can easily post to a group. But I can't easily adjust the membership of that group. Otoh, I post maybe once a year, so who knows.
Also Discord - tons of people use Discord as a social network and keep up with friends. I must have 5 friend groups that have their own Discords with some overlap.
What killed Google+ is the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. They had a brief window where everyone wanted to use it, and they kept it locked behind a hard to get invite system for months and months.
It was worse than that: they forced _everyone_ into it, whether or not you had any interest in using it.
They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app.
They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it.
1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word.
2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.
Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.
> the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good.
That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political.
X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off.
I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.
Bluesky is political because their invite-only on-boarding process for months meant that only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in. By the time your average person who just wanted to stop seeing ads about Great Replacement Theory or whatever found their way into Bluesky, it was chock full of furry art, "fandom" posting from teenagers on the spectrum, and political rambling from people who haven't touched grass since puberty.
How does having a really tightly controlled and/or lengthy invite period translate into the user base being of one particular political viewpoint? I'm not seeing the causal link. Even if I take at face value your claim that "only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in," I still don't see how these subgroups or subcultures would necessarily have the same political views.
My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.
>Twitter is a haven for people who are fans of generating non-consensual porn of others, white supremacy/white nationalism, murder of innocent civilians, and other reprehensible things.
It's really not. It's where everyone is right now. The Trots and Maoists. The demsoc local politicians. The vegan militant organizers. Etc. You can also include whatever shitty group you want to cherry pick to make your disingenuous ass argument. And when you do, post it to Bluesky where people can get a dopamine rush with you as they shake their heads and smile and post how horrible it is.
> If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant.
This is a weird comment because it treats connections like they're only an asset for the person being followed.
The people doing the following aren't even considered. They're supposed to continuously re-follow the people they want to follow?
I don't see any upsides to this for anyone. I'm not reading social media every day. I don't want the network to automatically expire my follows and force me to remember and re-discover who I want to follow all the time. I don't want the people I follow feeling like they desperately need to pursue relevance instead of just being themselves.
If Selena Gomez is "socially irrelevant" then why do you care that she has 400 million followers? What does this take away from you in any way?
Because I don't want to see all her posts on my timeline anymore. I have to actively unfollow her to do that, which is more work.
That's more work than even following someone, because it asks for confirmation or pops up a separate modal to unfollow, which it doesn't do for following someone. And so I don't even bother.
This leads to stale social networks and algorithmic timelines.
What does this mean? Like in practical feature terms and benefit to the end user?
Your system kills the social networks ability to act as someone's modern day rolodex of contact information of previous acquaintances. What do they get in exchange for that?
As someone who's been working on social networking and adjacent services for over 15 years, hard disagree.
An ideal social network should not have any agency of its own, period. If your feed is too crowded because you follow too many people, then so be it. It's your problem, you did this to yourself. Only you know how to fix it for yourself, if you do even want it fixed in the first place.
real world social networks have agency if you define ephemerality as agency. It's an accident of digital platforms that nothing is ever forgotten, not a feature inherent to normal human relations. In the real world you drop phone numbers, you forget events, unused relationships atrophy. And that's not a bug, forgetting is a feature. For anyone who isn't convinced of this, Black Mirror did an admirable job in its first season putting the pathologies of social technologies on display that record everything.
It can be argued that humans actually hate forgetting things. That's why we invented writing. Spoken language lets us share arbitrarily abstract thoughts with others. But human memory is imperfect, so spreading knowledge or memories through word-of-mouth is unreliable. Writing lets us preserve that information as intended by the original author, potentially indefinitely. That's also why we always wanted to be able to record and play back what we hear and see, and our civilization only fairly recently, in terms of history, got advanced enough to have technologies to do that.
>It can be argued that humans actually hate forgetting things
I agree with you, I don't even think that needs to be argued, we without a doubt hate forgetting things, but we also hate eating our vegetables. We do hate a lot of things we probably shouldn't. We are perpetual hoarders, as a species we have the bad habit that we're not very grateful for the problems we don't have as a consequence of things we don't keep. We're not very good thinking in terms of absence.
That's why Marie Kondo sold a ton of books and got a great Netflix deal simply by teaching people how to throw stuff into the garbage. Civilization is great at record keeping but not doing too well on the social bonding front, or in the words of George Carlin: https://youtu.be/MvgN5gCuLac
I mean Kim & Selena will always have a certain level of celebrity status but people like Sydney Sweeney are currently a lot more popular. This is in terms of "are they the most popular people right now" as their instagram count states. They are literally in the top 10 on instagram right now.
haha yeah it makes her so obviously more popular and thus her follower count more "accurate". The parent's point is just hard to hold.
Pretty sure she founded or runs skims? She's Armenian, daughter of a famous lawyer in LA. Kanye. Sex tape. Early with the reality tv. I too did not seek out any of this knowledge!
Most just be a generational thing. Sweeney is still baking. She's actress from euphoria of which i didn't watch. That's about as much as i know. and the jeans ad controversy.
Nah, bad idea. The timeframe of an active connection really varies by age and type. Some important connections are once-every-few-years communications. A year, or two years, etc is too arbitrary.
I'm pretty sure there was a Black Mirror episode about social scoring dictating peoples value/relevance. That was a good place for such a concept, because letting social media sites dictate someone's relevance is just weird. Relevance is a personal opinion, and should remain that way. People are free to stop following others. It works, and isn't dystopian.
I assume you would just unfollow them if you want to stop seeing their posts? It sounded more like the person I was talking to was more concerned with follower counts being accurate, which doesn’t seem relevant for feed algorithms.
I would hate it if the system removed nodes from my network without my influence. Perhaps a rules engine with user defined criteria would be useful.
Ultimately, users define their network in current-day social media and the relevance of any celebrity or other person within it.
400M people still find Selena Gomez relevant to themselves - she’s simply not relevant to you. I asked Gemini very simply “is Selena Gomez relevant” and it responded with essentially “more in 2026 than ever.”
Could potentially show you withering connections you havent interacted with, almost an auto recycle bin with the option to dig on there and bring it back later on but dissapear from your main radius of attention if withered.
Instagram has something like this where it shows you "least interacted with". It seems broken to me though, as it showed me people who I do interact with.
I don’t post on Facebook—HN is my closest analogue. But I assure you my partner(s) have no interest in seeing whatever I post here. Any more than I want to be in the thick of the extended-family group chats. Or, frankly, Facebook.
In that sense, maybe this is Facebook doing its part for domestic harmony…
It sure justifies the creepy People You May Know though, doesn't it? Which apparently outs sex workers and whatever else
If you're going to move fast and break things and connect the world full steam ahead (and damn the consequences like what happened in Myanmar) your platform better be absolutely rock solid but Facebook doesn't even do that. Its implementation of 'connection' is laughable
Followers is a somewhat meaningless metric. Instead look at something like likes or views. The most relevant posts will spread via the algorithm and get the most views.
> So I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.
And thus ensured your social network won't have 72% of the world on it... And locally for anyone outside the USA, a far higher percentage.
Any chance of making the code open source? Would love to contribute to this and build more features needed. It’s an absolute bliss to see such a clean UI and no nonsense. I think you should consider that. Thanks for building this
> this failed Apple App Store review because of Guideline 4.2 — Design — Minimum Functionality. They said “the usefulness of the app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users. Specifically, the app is intended for invited friends only.”
This is why we need laws regulating mobile platforms. Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you use your phone for, or what apps you can give to your users. Doesn't work that way for PCs, shouldn't work that way for computers in your pocket.
Not trying to defend App Store policies, but writing this just for those who are struggling with Guideline 4.2 trying to publish an app that is only intended for a small group of users. There is a less well-known option called "unlisted app distribution", similar to unlisted YouTube videos: the app is public and can be downloaded using the direct link, but it cannot be found in App Store search. The "small, or niche, set of users" guideline normally does not apply for such apps.
To request unlisted distribution for your app, send it for review as usual, then file a special form [1], and mention that in the review notes.
Source: I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school. Its audience is, indeed, not of Apple scale: the school parents living nearby. Apple refused it as 4.2 and only agreed to publish it as unlisted, which I was okay with, because sharing the link between the parents was not a big deal. Google had no problems with publishing the Android app normally though.
> I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school.
Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
> 2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
If Apple supported the beforeinstallprompt event (available in Chrome since 2015) then people would have same experience as installing app [0]. Instead, you must create a wrapper around webpage and submit thru App Store.
The main driver for making it into an app and not just a web page was the need to send push notifications. Of course, I just needed it for myself: hey, it's time to stop working and start driving to school to pick up the kid – "notify me 30 minutes before the last period ends" given that the schedule is different every day; then I just shared it with other parents.
There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy to make one), but parents use the app much more often.
there still a lot of jank. on ios u can only doo this with safari, and even then u loose actual safari niceties like trad browser ui. and idk why but it op ens link in actual safari even if its the same app. unless u have a single page app that does nothing this is not a viable route/.
I really hate it when the browser UI gets hidden. It loses me several great features like the ability to open multiple tabs. Or have a bookmark directly to a subpage.
Unfortunately some other features are only available to PWA do it's a tradeoff either way.
I live in the EU and just wrote my first PWA and that‘s not true, there is (almost) NO browser ui/ux.
No url bar, no back/forward, no tabs, nor translation, no menu bar, no loading indicator, just… pressing down on a link shows the target url and offers open, copy link, add to reading list and share -which honestly looks like a weird oversight.
I also have a small private app that technically could have been a PWA.
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
I often get in trouble on HN for being more sympathetic than most towards Apple. But that reasoning by Apple is ridiculous. They allow apps which only function if you buy a specific $100k+ EV, or some niche audiophile amp. Usefulness doesn’t get much more limited than that.
What even is the idea, what would be the value in weeding out niche apps, if they did it consistently? To reduce the work involved in keeping everything in the garden lovely?
None of the app store rules are used as guiding principles for ensuring some higher goal. It's just a bunch of random rules that allow them to ban anything they don't like at any moment in time. Sometimes it's because of the whims of a particular app store reviewer, and sometimes it's to get rid of apps that compete with something Apple wants to do.
I've been thinking about this because I'm working on an internal company tool. It's a web app but I was thinking about creating mobile apps. In the age of agentic coding, that's no longer a massive undertaking like it used to be.
However, I'm completely blocked by Apple app store review. There's no way an app designed for 30 people would pass.
I can't get an internal app onto people's phone. I could release it as a test app but that might get blocked at any point.
I can at least release a PWA but as I understand even that might get notifications blocked at any point, with no recourse, and of course functionality is highly limited.
So the goal here is clear: don't allow people to write small apps.
Apple can then make sure they are only allowing apps that required enough work, both initially and ongoing, that nearly everyone will feel the need to charge, or include ads, and then Apple gets a 30% cut every time.
As for why a car company's app passes, obviously they don't want anyone with enough power to challenge this in court, politically, or in the media. So those get a pass.
There is Apple enterprise for this reason. Depending on the set of APIs you want to use (which should be limited since you spoke of webapps), it allows you to distribute internal business apps.
Don’t know how known this is. But we use it mainly for internal testing.
> The Apple Developer Enterprise Program allows large organizations to develop and deploy proprietary, internal-use apps to their employees
> Your organization must:
> Have 100 or more employees
Again, it's clear that they're providing this out so that organizations with power don't have to start a fight, while small organizations can't do anything.
Even aside from that, it's clearly going to be so much work that we wouldn't be able to do it. I'm the only developer at the company, I cannot get bogged down in Apple review processes.
For internal apps, you could go through ADEP [1] if you want to avoid the app store + review + custom apps route. But eligibility requriements have been tightened over the years IIRC.
I think its just to mitigate spam apps. The window's app store is kinda garbage. Apple doesn't want to spend their QA resources on apps that only 10 people can use.
I don’t believe that the government should police what types of computers I can build. I occasionally tinker with hardware myself and have been thinking up ways to build a smartphone differently. If I want to make the device so that it only interoperates with a certain class of items, I would rather build nothing at all than be forced by the government to interop with everything, which is also a costly thing to develop.
I get it that people want more freedom from their iPhones but the thing about consumer devices is that they are an expression of a certain philosophy of how computers should work. Being a walled garden is one such approach. If you don’t agree with how a device operates on principle, you should not buy it—there’s Android or derivatives. You’re also likely to be a power user who’s in an incredible small minority because iPhone sales keep getting better every year and the walled garden approach has market (as in free market) validation.
Now, if your objective is to regulate monopolies, I think that the policing should happen in the supply chain and production side instead of the consumer software side. You don’t have more options than iPhone and Android because big players like Apple and Samsung have captured manufacturing facilities with long-term exclusivity contracts, making innovation in the space prohibitively expensive. But the law shouldn’t dictate what sort of computer innovators are allowed to build.
That’s not related to the subject at hand, which is regulation preventing anti-competitive practices in monopolies and market failures. I thought that was clearly established, or you need to be over-prompted
It’s uncomfortable to agree because I think companies should decide what they do and don’t allow in the ecosystems they own. But once an ecosystem becomes so pervasive & necessary, I think control must be turned over to the people.
That rule reminds me of Raya. Isn't the whole idea of that service (which is only available on iOS, I think) that it's only intended for a small group of users, who've been invited?
Wording can go a long way - calling it early access, and saying invitations will allow you to invite your friends as the platform opens up can paint a similar picture in a different way.
Apple also shouldn't force you to use Safari if you install Chrome on iOS, but so far the DOJ hasn't followed through with the antitrust lawsuit started under the previous administration. I guess gold participation trophies are enough to work around lawsuits depending on who is in charge.
They dictate the capabilities that their device is offered and how the device is designed. It is up to the consumer to decide if that is worth the price of the device.
To be blunt it doesn't matter if you have a choice or not - this sort of behavior shouldn't be permitted either way. It's an appliance that at this point serves an essential function in society so user hostile behavior ought to be strictly prohibited.
The guiding principle should continue to be that manufacturers and retailers don't get to control the second hand market or dictate what users do with the things they purchase. Digital controls used to thwart the owner's freedom should be outlawed.
Apple is, because of vendor-lock in. Once you're sufficiently dependent on Apple's ecosystem it becomes painful to switch to a competitor because it requires switching to a different smartphone which then locks you out of most of Apple's ecosystem.
You are correct and I don't get OP's point. Don't want apple rules, don't use apple products. They are the business, they can do what they want with it, right?
We have consistently made exceptions to this rule in situations with limited choices. We would not abide by the electric company dictating a range of things, even of you have the option to run your own generator.
The truth is there are two reasonable platforms, as long as that is the case we should apply scrutiny.
I'd go even farther than that. The US should adopt an equivalent of the second amendment regarding end user control over personal electronics and it should bind not only the government but also private enterprise. We are increasingly dependent on these devices to go about our day to day lives and they have not only been used against us for mass surveillance but are also quickly gaining the ability to exhibit intelligence and act autonomously.
Car makers cannot do anything they want and call it a car. The motivation there is safety, but it's long been argued that personal computing devices are today extension of our lives.
Even more comparable is postal rules: at least here, there are very explicit rules about opening someone else's mail, or even destroying it. Even if postal/courier services are businesses, they have to operate within the boundaries a society sets up for them.
And finally, you can take it even further: some "businesses" operate on the fringes of legality and sometimes illegally too (think loan shark operations, casinos, betting markets... but also "protection services" and similar).
There are standards for interoperability and user-friendliness with all kinds of devices, and we should expect the same from modern devices.
It would have been pretty peculiar and unacceptable if your telephone in the 80s couldn't call your neighbour because the telephone company just decided to not make them interoperable, why shouldn't it be the same here?
Not for long if Google has any say about it. Hardware remote attestation is here, and it's the number one threat to mobile computing freedom.
The future is one where everyone can, theoretically, install anything they want, but they get banned from everything should they actually do so. Rooted system? Attestation fails. "Oh no, looks like someone tampered with the system". Can't access your bank account. Can't communicate via WhatsApp. Can't watch something on the streaming services. Can't even play video games.
Discrimination against "untrustworthy" devices, where "untrustworthy" means not corporate owned. Leading to complete ostracization.
GrapheneOS already has their own attestation API that verifies the app is running on GrapheneOS. Since GrapheneOS is more secure than stock Android, security conscious apps like banking apps have a solid technical reason to use the API and support Graphene.
We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API, if they are already using Google's attestation API.
GrapheneOS's strategy for raising their profile and being seen as more legitimate is that they've formed a partnership with Motorola Mobility, who will be manufacturing Graphene compatible phones. <https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...>
> Since GrapheneOS is more secure than stock Android, security conscious apps like banking apps have a solid technical reason to use the API and support Graphene.
Corporations don't use such things for technical reasons. Their reasons are political. They want control. The "security" they talk about isn't the user's security, it's their own security from the user.
> We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API
And until they do, GrapheneOS is permanently at risk of being shut out of the market.
And even if they do, it just means we've become dependent on GrapheneOS. They won't trust our keys, only those of corporations. Our freedom is still compromised.
That would immediately exclude 124 million Americans. Freedom of choice would be giving us the same choice we already have on PCs. We shouldn't keep allowing the mobile duopoly to control this vital and ubiquitous resource for their profit at our expense.
"There's a small corner where they're just as bad! Checkmate!"
I totally agree that should be swappable, but what is your point? Apple doesn't even allow installing stuff outside their store in most places, and had to be legally forced to do it in some because of how ridiculous that obviously is (thanks, EU!). And even there they still have some control with their notarization process. Android is wildly more open in major, meaningful ways, despite some failures.
> All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.
I understand the sentiment - but this would make it useless for my closest friends - we live in different cities and countries now - and it would take years to fill in the social graph. We would all have to travel and meet everyone else.
I suppose this is alleviated by the talk to a friend of a friend feature - but does sound like it partially excludes friends with limited mobility.
Craigslist never sold afaik, theres loads of other example companies worth more than a billion now that never sold. Depends how you define "project" of course, but you gotta make sure you don't define it such that this would no longer be a "project" when it's worth 1bn. Also everything that sells for more than 1bn is something that presumably nobody would sell for 1bn.
The idea that anyone would sell any project for 1bn is kinda nonsense, if a project looks worth buying for 1bn to someone, it may look to be worth keeping to the people who made it or are in control of it.
$1B is life changing money. More than you can reasonably spend, unless you start an airline or something like that. $1m is like two Ferraris. If you buy the second one used. Of course it's also life-changing amounts of money to many. It's enough to retire in a cheap country. But only if you are very careful about your money
There are a lot of projects I would sell for $1m, but it is little enough that I would carefully consider for anything I've invested serious time into
I dunno, if I spent even a couple years building something and could sell it for a million relatively quickly I probably would too unless it's something I'm really passionate about. I've sold side projects for waaaay less.
yea the moment 1bn was on the table id quickly think about how not-necessary social media is for humanity and id take the check and peace out like tom from myspace & proceed to drink liquor out of coconuts on a beach somewhere.
though id have the utmost respect for someone who could hold onto the possibility to threaten the facebook/instagram/snapchat moat, realistically i don't think anyone in here could stick to the ideals so strongly.
it's not even a valuable thought exercise. if this thing were to gain any traction at all it's assuredly gonna get acquired. you gotta be tech-buddha to resist that.
It is good to point out this alternative is 90% likely going to be a rugpull on "nice cosy 90s style social network" by systemic factors. Regardless of the intent of the owner.
I just realised federated helps re. censorship but not privacy/secrecy needs.
I mean.. yeah. That's why no "Facebook like 2007" social networks have happened since. It would have to be run by someone with a lot of built up trust in order for people to trust it in the way that people did with Facebook. The world has been burnt.
If say, Valve started a social network I would consider using it because they've had decades to screw up Steam and they haven't. It is a bit outside their wheelhouse though.
I attended a concert last night and was wishing for this exact kind of app, being able to quickly exchange a follow with someone you just met in real life but will otherwise never see again unless you specifically ask for their name/number, which is awkward. Could spawn some special relationships.
> unless you specifically ask for their name/number, which is awkward
How is this any less awkward? "Oh do you have the new Friendster app?" "Friendster? Isn't that from the 1900s?" "No, the new Friendster, see you download it, register, then we bump phones...."
Maybe just because I'm an autistic introvert, but the idea of asking someone to exchange numbers is terrifying enough, but at least this is an almost universal social ritual that people understand implicitly. I ask if you want to keep in touch and exchange phone numbers. I do not need to explain literally anything else and the other person almost always knows what I mean, how to do it, and what thin social relationship that implies. And if they don't seem to understand or are hesitant, but are otherwise coherent and cogent, I take the message that they don't want to keep in touch.
Now add a new app to download (iPhone only), a new social network to register, a new social ritual... Are they being hesitant because this is a new app or because they don't actually want to keep in touch? No thanks.
I love that you're looking to "spawn some special relationships" but are unwilling to ask for a name/number. There's no app in the world that will stop you from "wishing" you took action in getting some girls number.
The previous owner bought it for $8000 (quite less for domains like this) but here is the catch. This domain has a bad reputation and a lot of negativity since it has a long history.
Those who are in domain name business knows that because it affects the value of every expired/operational domain.
When you're building a social networking site like this, when do you need to start to worry about laws from different states and countries (eg age bans, data export, etc)?
I mean, it's good to be aware from the beginning, even if you don't intend to follow them right away.
But, my rule of thumb is you don't really need to worry about laws from places where they don't have real jurisdiction on you. If they filed suit, would you rather respond or make a note to never visit that place / would you be ok if all your users from there were blocked from contacting you by law?
As a guy who used to run game servers[0] and some other small-web stuff, I hate that this is one of the first questions that springs to mind today, but I'd also like to know.
[0]: in ancient times when server meant an actual server
Does the new owner of the domain friendster.com also own the company, the patents and the other pieces of intellectual property? The article seemed to be unclear about this.
Not for the operators, I expect. If they flip a couple bits in the webserver I think they can lock the API down to require a device attestation, which would inhibit much of the API’s attack surface from being exploitable without a physical device that can afford to be console-banned (but I haven’t done my research to prove that yet, so grain of feasibility salt). Certainly in this day and age there is no desire to be “search engine optimized” by anyone using a social network for IRL friends, so they lose nothing by lacking a website. And there’s lots of small but nice services that are or have been iOS only (and a couple big ones that collapsed once they opened to other platforms). They’re explicitly selecting against the network effect already in favor of a nice experience, so it’s not like it matters if it grows more slowly. Are there drawbacks you see besides “requires an iOS device” that I haven’t considered?
Why people automatically think that social media should be like facebook and you should be global entity with billions of users? Wouldn’t actual social - in the literal meaning of the word - media mean that you share cool shit with maybe 3-10 of your closest friends who you actually see and hang out with, who are local to you? If you have an online game community, maybe you should meet once a year for IRL beer to tap phones? Perhaps we don’t live in a global village after all, perhaps we are are dumb tribal monkeys with super computers in our pockets?
I agree. There should be a hierarchy of intimacy, as it were, in order to initiate a friendship.
* Tapping Phones
* Confirming Phone Number
* Confirming Email
* Connected via Other Platforms (Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc)
As far as maintaining a friendship by tapping phones, again, I would make the friendships a constant and graph / rank intimacy by how often you tap phones as well as how connected you are to your friend (phone, email, connections on other networks).
I love the idea of hierarchy of intimacy, that is a great concept/phrase.
I'd make it so you could tap a phone, you know their phone number, you know their email. Importantly in my eyes, you shouldn't be able to navigate to a profile and just ask to connect as that'd mean you could do that to people you don't actually know (whereby knowing is inferred by you knowing some amount of their personal info such as tap, phone, email).
I'd stay away from your last option of 'other platforms', per my other reply below in that those platforms allow you to connect to anyone/anything. There is nothing in them that say this connection is inherently personal vs being generic.
I hate phone numbers and hate given them out and I hate that I'm required to even have on in 2026. I'm reachable without one. The majority of my friends do not know my phone number. Only the really old ones from back before messaging apps with free calling
In my head, the new Friendster owner wants to drive some amount of true personal connection - hence the tapping.
The problem I see with not using a phone number as I described, is that you'd be connecting to any old social profile - could be Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
None of those are inherently personal, it'd open up Friendster to be not materially different to any other social network as those networks don't have the concept of a personal connection - they are just generic connections (some are personal, many/most are not).
A dream I had last night was for a social network based on the deep but brief conversations we have in park benches, club toilets, hospital waiting rooms. Where we are totally open somewhat vulnerable but free from commitments. Think about the first conversation you have had with a friend, often it's the most revealing or deep one you may have.
Somewhat anonymous, short in time, one to one, with the potential to connect afterwards on outside channels. Possibly only one conversation a day allowed, and possibly only available to pre set contacts.
Too bad Apple wouldn't allow the registration requiring the tapping - it would have been cool if whole social network was a tree with a single root - the founder.
Ofc it's probably for the better if it's to have a chance to spread at least a little.
The only thing I liked when I did use Facebook was the "wall". To be able to post on a friend's wall semi- publically where their friends can see it. Most other Facebook clones have had the idea of tagging, but it wasn't the same. (E.g. Google+)
If you meet someone this often to touch your phones, why do you even need to have an app to talk to that person? The beauty of social apps is that I can talk to someone who I can’t physically meet that often
That's a great question, since the genesis of this was the domain name, which no one using the app will care about or visit. That is, the only thing that was actually needed here was the trademark, it appears.
why not a proper Progress Web App so it can run on any device independent of app stores? it's not as though a social app needs deep OS integration. I'm sure Claude or Codex could vibe code that in an afternoon.
I managed to make an ESP32-controlled RC car move by sending it commands from a webapp running on my Android phone last year. I don't believe I have telekinesis magic power, so I'd rather believe that this is not in-fact iOS only.
For the record, the feature you describe was first introduced on Samsung phones 14 years ago - and later removed, likely after poor adoption. Because Apple "reinvented it", it's now planned to be reintroduced on Android too.
It's likely much more than half because I don't see a guy working on his laptop and switching on his phone to be able to answer messages, I personally never use social medias on a phone, it's annoying to type.
I prefer most communication to happen from my phone. Keeps the laptop less distracting when I don’t talk with people so much on it. Except Slack on work computer. That one I keep open and use for talking with coworkers. But that’s because it’s part of the job, and also relevant for me and them to be talking about things we are working on.
I really like the idea of a “facebook before it got bad “, with just people you actually know posting about what they’re up to.
But the “tap phones” thing wouldn’t work for me.
Most of my friends and family live halfway around the world from me. I visit the states every couple years, and make a point of seeing them when I can, but the reality is I live here and they live there (a dozen different theres in half a dozen countries)
Those are the people I want an app like this to keep up with. But they’re the people your app won’t even let me add as friends.
What does "a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue" look like? Is this domain one where people randomly stumble upon it and give ad views to a parking page? A website with regular use or other content that people visit for some purpose that is now under different ownership?
I have sliver of idea for social media based on curiosity and knowledge tidbits.
Each user gives itself some field of interest, maybe its makeup, maybe its molecular biology, maybe it's something else. Then the system finds similar people with same interests.
There are no subreddits with abusive moderators, no rigid containers. Just that you get content you are interested in based on genuine people. Then you can like talk to them about these things or see them posting about the stuff
and you get separate feeds for each kind of stuff,probably ai categorization
I remember Friendster being very popular in parts of Latin America / Brazil and Philippines. I think you could definitely get a lot of users through the nostalgia factor.
What if somebody's phone is of an alternative type, like a flip phone, and they can't install the app needed to tap phones? Then how will they become friends with another
This is quite amazing. I remember being on the original friendster way back in the day. They had so much potential. And there was also orkut.com that was even better because of the simpler UX. Then came Facebook and you all know the rest.
This sounds cool and similar to something I’ve been building! I say similar as we have different ideas and target audiences — What I’m building is a niche network specifically targeting people who are travellers or friends that like holidaying together. I don’t want to seem like I’m spamming or self promoting so will keep the link out but will share if people want.
Anyway, I digress, it would be great to connect and exchange ideas if you have the time? I really like the idea of fading connections.
>I don’t really care about making money from [$project], but I’d like it to eventually pay for itself.
Warning bells. Slippery slopes. I think we should know by now that social networks do not mix well with the advertising business model. It would have been nice to see that eventuality ruled out explicitly here (PS: for the future as well as just for now).
Just a thought: you could incorporate a non-profit to run the site, like Wikipedia or public radio/media, and be the president of that organization. For me, donating to a non-profit is much easier than a voluntary subscription to a for-profit corporation.
Love the app, I’ve already had some photos shared with me!
Facebook ads began in 2004 with simple "Flyers" for small businesses, but the official, targeted Facebook Ads platform launched in November 2007. While rudimentary banner ads appeared in 2005-2006, the 2007 launch introduced brand pages, social ads, and user insights.
Who visits those long expired domains to generate ad revenue? People nostalgic? People who hear this Friendster thing and want to check out what they are doing now?
Right? And who clicks the popups? I have no clue about the economics of online ads, but my understanding is, it is cents per click. This would mean hundreds of thousands visits per year? Sounds like there are bots involved to me.
There are loads of dead links hovering around on the internet, no doubt plenty of people (and bots convincing enough that advertisers still pay out) will accidentally end up on one of these domains, sigh at the annoying ad that interrupted what they were doing, and never return.
I just made a similar idea focused on games only with people next to you, https://lorehex.co/ can you reach out to me and we can connect? my website and contact info at jperla.com
That's so cool. I would have expected for the domain to go for hundreds of thousands or millions, or, more likely, not not be purchasable for some reason. I can see a future where google.com is purchased for fun by some robot in 200 years.
I don't use WhatsApp, but I've noticed a similar trend more generally. I've got several Matrix group chats with friends and family I regularly post in, a handful of small to medium IRC channels with internet friends I've talked to for years, etc. It feels like Twitter and Instagram and so on are a lot less personal now, just curated posts based on the algorithm, and lots of people who've decided they're comedians. I even will link an interesting post from a social media site in a group chat pretty often, but don't interact with the people from that chat on social media platforms themselves.
Have you spent much time thinking about how the feed will work? Balancing the “quality” and enjoyment with the prioritization of “people you met in person”. I’m sure I’m far from the only one who misses the old Facebook feed, but curious what a modern take on that would look like.
The tap-to-connect constraint makes this work. Every social network removes friction; this one keeps it on purpose. Won't scale to billions, but maybe that's the point.
lmao i cannot stand medium. the amount of articles i've clicked into on medium that start with
"in todays fast paced business environment.."
the incentive structure on medium is so busted. just people churning out half-working insights to look good for job interviews or promotions, it's like the worlds laziest portfolio. it straight up isn't any sort of bastion of knowledge-share.
The tapping phones thing really limits the utility of this, and I suspect gives away something about the age of the author - as one gets older, friends move away from the place where you originally made friends, often all over the world. Given I'm not allowed to connect with most of my friends via friendster, there doesn't seem to be much point in creating an account.
Probably being pedantic, but this is not buying Friendster to be precise, usually what is meant by that is that the company was bought.
In this case the domain Friendster.com was bought, and a trademark was conceded (a new different trademark), I don't know precisely the implications of the trademark though, I think it's a different trademark and you still cannot imply that you are a continuation of the previous trademark holder, it's just that you are given monopoly over that word as a trademark.
Now, is that different than buying "Friendster"? A really interesting legal question, I think it is, and I think it has relevant implications, I don't think you can for example restore the website as it was and pretend a continuation as you would if you bought the company.
Honestly if the prior Friendster company itself was bought - including all the assets, codebase and historical documents (no user details) that would've been such an incredibly interesting read.
Buying the domain and getting the trademark is still cool, just not as cool.
fwiw, I think that subjectively it's roughly equivalent in this specific case. The domain name is a huge part of the brand, and is almost equivalent to the list of prior clients.
I think that it will probably be fine if they compete in the same space of a social network, doesn't look like someone is going to go after them, the company that would have a claim against them is defunct, so even if they have a legal argument, who would raise the case? If the owners do so under their personal name it's even a weaker argument.
So in practice, in this case, subjectively I believe that it's effectively very similar as buying the company.
I thought I was the only one immediately sceptical when I heard domains, without content, bought for multiple thousand dollars just for ad revenue? How does that even work, surely there cannot be lots of legitimate traffic for a site that shut down 10 years ago?
It all depends on how you define "social network". We had BBS and forums that operated much like "social networks" in the mid 90s. I don't think being "the first social network" is particularly interesting or noteworthy.
That's not how the term is being used. Six Degrees had all the features we associate with a social network, such as profiles, and the ability to create connections.
app is snappy and solid. missing a “invite friends” link… i know the point is in person, i’m with two people in person but had to go back to app store to find a share link.
Firstly, it doesn’t seem to work for me and my wife - we hold the phones together but clicking start does nothing (and we’ve accepted Bluetooth etc).
Secondly, I wonder if you’ll have a massive chicken and egg issue with the physical feature. I get it’s the main feature but could you overcome it somehow initially while still maintaining your long term “gimmick”? Like could you allow people to connect with the first X friends (5? 10? 20? Whatever that can get virality and flywheel going) or connect with as many as you want virtually for the first X months etc. You could even have the contacts fade away slowly if they don’t get verified in person etc. You might want to model out different strategies (and be extremely conservative) otherwise you’ll be relying on lottery-level luck. Good luck anyway though :)
I run an iOS-only app that Serves a small, specific demographic (and is free. It does not generate any revenue). It’s been shipping for a bit over two years, and has just over 1,000 users. I seriously doubt it will ever get more than a couple of thousand (a rounding error, for most folks around here). I did test it with 12,000 users, so it should handle the anticipated load.
I am writing the 2.0 version, now. I think I’ll add the “tap to connect” feature, and probably QR codes, as well.
> I’d like it to eventually pay for itself [...] — but that’s a problem for later.
Hard pass from me dawg. If you don't know the business model now, folks like me are tired of trusting their data to randos on the internet without a plan for sustainability. Guaranteed to end up being just another data farm.
These, to me, feel like artifacts of a bygone era, now replaced by the boiled down version - group chats with friends. Telegram has every feature you need in a platform and you get the joy of "circles" as one poster mentioned, by simply having different group chats.
Can you please make it (and keep it) so that friendships are symmetrical? I.e., "friend" rather than "follow". IMO that's the enshittification inflection point of Facebook.
Interesting project. I bought the domain name for a startup I worked for in the early 2000s. It was just there to be bought from the regular registrar process -- no need to bid or pay more than a few $. This article makes me want to do something with it. I don't own the trademark.
I love the idea generally of creating a social network that's meant to not suck, but the whole tapping phones thing is bad. The major benefit of Instagram, for me, is that it allows me to maintain relationships with people I am unable to physically see for long periods. I don't need social media to stay in touch with people I am physically present with, I need it for bridging distances.
> a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online
my skin crawled. I live a fulfilling, creative life. I'm married, have kids, the whole nine yards. My best friendships are with people I know almost entirely online, or haven't physically seen in years because we live on different continents.
I have little interest in most of the people I see regularly, because we're friends only because our kids are in the same classes.
PLEASE if you are developing only for the Mac ecosystem, you should be required to put (Mac only) in your title so the rest of us don't completely WASTE our time.
> My wife and I met on OkCupid. I wouldn’t have my kids without it. Websites like that genuinely change the course of people’s lives — people meet, fall in love, build families. That’s incredible to me.
> If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it.
Did you tap phones for OkCupid? The type of network you are building does not work that way -- you will not build the same types of connections in-person as you can online. I hope it goes well, but it's not the same type of thing.
judging from what i hear people say. all you have to do is be able to display who's online from your friends list, and a chronologically ordered list of their posts. thats it. the major platforms are optimising for ads so much they cant even achieve this level of basic functionality
Could you make it so you can have group chats but you can invite anyone you’ve tapped before and they can all talk together (but still not be able to talk outside the group chat)
on the fading connection and monetization - you could let people pay to re-up the connection from fading as opposed to meeting in person again first, and its makes them really think about whether meeting in person is worth happening again or would ever happen again, is the connection itself valuable in another way any way
on instagram, there is a social disincentive to unfollow people and you can also make someone else unfollow you in a couple ways (the button that does just that, as well as blocking someone for a second and unblocking them), doing these actions has a real cost to confrontation. people you thought you would never see again will see you again and say "I thought we were following each other???? oooo :O ... ooooh >:O"
you are making that activity a first class citizen, with no presumption of ill will behind it, this has value to it
> $20k dollars in bitcoin (I can’t say how much bitcoin that is because it fluctuates too much to be a stable currency), to buy a dead domain that makes $9k a year in at revenue
That's...a good deal? Assuming even 50% margins, that's a solid yield.
Please don't post generic ideological sermons on HN. Sure, any money anyone ever spends or invests could arguably be put to better use. It’s a jerk move to bring it up in a tangential context like this. We have no idea what kind of charitable/benevolent work or giving this person does, or what they may plan to do in the future with any gains they make from this or other investments. It's not fair to post this kind of condemnation based on knowing very little about them, and it's against the guidelines to engage in ideological battle or introduce generic tangents.
Promoting auto-censure is also falling in ideological sermons, so this is going nowhere consistent. Only in illusion can one think to stand on apolitical and ideological-less point of view.
There is a rating system, and it’s fine some posts goes down to oblivion if it doesn’t fit the majority mindset of voting users.
It’s true what’s this person is doing on charitable/benevolent work is unknown, and the post anticipated this scenario and did express appreciation if that was the case.
Plus, calling for a step back to think about one own actions on their own terms, that’s not what we could categorize a harsh condemnation.
Favoring closed information bubbles, void of any critical thought is doing no one a favor.
In a world where I am trying to use my phone much less due to ingress of tracking, destroying my mind etc having a social media where its required is a bit of a no-no for me tbh. Additionally I feel like this puts more friction on those of us that are shy and weird, for us the internet and online places are where we can be ourselves. I wouldn't ask you if I could follow you on Twitter, I'd just do it because I find your stuff interesting. Putting a hurdle in the way of connection might sound daft but is enough for many not to use it or miss-connections.
For me the special sauce that's been taken away from SM is just seeing my friends stuff, I want to see your dog with out it having to be a 2min video with onscreen graphics, SEO keyword optimisation in the post title and brand tags. Show me your fluffy dog updates, just dont force me to ask you about it first.