Ask HN: What are some promising “healthy social media” projects?

I've just started calling my family on a regular basis. I never used to like phone calls, but I've gotten over it. For other people, if we haven't lived in the same city or seen each other for 25 years and we drift apart, oh well, we'll survive in the same way people have for ages as friends they used to know and love dropped out of their lives.

There are other ways. My wife's siblings have all kept a more or less permanent group text going for over a decade. One of my cousins sends out a paper newsletter to everyone once a year.

The small number of old-time friends in other parts of the country that I was ever truly close to I trust will still contact me if they're ever in the area, and I will contact them if I'm ever in their area, and there's always the 30 year reunion. I don't really need to know what they're up to on a daily basis. I just need to know if one of us ever really truly needs the other, we'll be there, and I do trust that even if I'm not given a live feed of their daily activities and opinions.

Have you tried calling, texting, or e-mailing them? That's been working great as a "social media replacement" for many people I know after they ditched the online social media companies.

Well, since you asked... :-)

I've been working on something in this space for a little while. It's called Circles. Originally, I just wanted a safer and easier way to share baby photos with my extended family. Safer than posting pictures of my kid publicly on Facebook. Easier / more convenient than pinging the crap out of everyone's phone on Signal.

It's kind of like a bare-bones version of Facebook. Only you can have multiple social circles (like in G+), each with your own "wall" for posting stuff and timeline of posts from the friends that you're following there.

All posts are E2E encrypted, using the same crypto as in Element/Matrix, and the back end is just a standard Matrix server. The E2EE prevents the server from seeing what you post, or from injecting crap into your timeline. You can use your own Matrix server, or you can sign up to create an account on mine.

It's open source: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

You're welcome to try out the beta if you want: https://testflight.apple.com/join/cwsJZed9

If all goes well, it should go live in the App Store later this month.

Unfortunately it's iOS only for now. I'm working as fast as I can to get started on an Android version.

If you try it out, please let me know what you think! Thanks!!!

I recommend SELECT, as its built on digital wellness principles. - They make a distinction between high signal and noisy activity. For example: - Doesn't send you notifications or activity to your inbox UNLESS its was sent to you personally, or there's activity on a post you've interacted with. - Notifications are batched to max 1/hour or 2/day - If you've consumed all your high signal activity, and you're still in the app a minute later, it will prompt you to lock your phone. - No public popularity scores - Everything is private by default, so no privacy settings but instead - opt-in exposure settings - Based on your 3 criteria, - Reach of Posts is limited to specific selected individuals or a single group. - even in the group context, - No Feed. No infinite scroll. No algorithmic recommendations. - No Ads or other conflicts of interest.

It's early, but promising. It's community oriented & only works by invitation, so here's one if you're keen to try - https://scholer.select.id/jdlj

I've been on the Internet since it was still called "Arpanet".

There is NO GOOD SOCIAL MEDIA - its nature is primarily negative and bad for society. The reason is that it's inherently addictive by design and it operates faster than the biological time constants of rationality. It can never be made "safe". It will always have negative outcomes.

Not sure how much this fits:

* fraidycat: RSS reader where the user can choose refresh rate for different type of feeds. Also different categories (i.e., friends vs brands).

* futureland.tv: a social media website focused on journals to document progress on users' projects. (no-ads)

I have been working on a decentralized social media platform that uses a token w/o cash value as a reputation and moderation system. The goal is to avoid needing a centralized content moderator. I'd love to chat about it if it sounds interesting.

We're currently using a telegram group chat as groups are still in development, only direct messages work due to complexity around the encryption.

A link to our chat is here: https://t.me/stampchat

A description of how things work is here: https://www.stampchat.io/whitepaper.pdf

Not a social media per se, but a decentralized hosting platform that will distribute decentralized apps securely, where one will privately host its own data and metadata on a home node.

https://holochain.org/

Apps in development (hApps) includes Acorn (for teams), Elemental chat (first actually available and functional distributed hApp), Snap mail, Junto, and more coming.

Not quite social media in the standard sense, but we've been working on https://wager.town -- a free-to-play "wagering game" that acts essentially as an open-ended prediction market. Limited to sports-fans so it's pretty niche, but our Discord feels nice and communal which was our goal.

I would love something that optimizes for curiosity, instead of engagement. I wonder sometimes what signals we could take from a social network to promote things that spark curiosity and don't play on anxiety, create flame wars, etc... And if such a thing is even monetizable or worth building.

Hacker news is the closest thing, but even here clickbait sometimes happens :)

https://Hylo.com is doing some interesting things with group coordination, and intended to be a non-profit I think.

Past year has also felt like the rise of using paid saas groups like circle.so and mightynetworks.

And for local groups seen friends migrate to signal.

There’s MeWe but to be honest, it’s kinda dead, some kinda cash grab service maybe, they make it a pain to leave too!! Mine is just sat there …. A bit like my Facebook and Instagram…

Unironically WeChat's moments are probably what you're looking for.

- They don't embed ads in moments.

- It's a chronological feed. And you only see posts from your friends (who you allow to view moments).

- You can set the expiration time of your moments (so no one can see anything older than 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 day (I think?), And keep them visible forever if you want.

- You can only view comments from your friends. Your friends will not see your comment if they aren't friends with the poster whose moment you replied to. And your friend's friends won't see the comment unless they're friends with you. This keeps things personal and avoids flamewars between randoms.

Anyways, I personally like to use Strava to keep up with my active friends. You get to see them as they go on vacations and when they've gotten vaccinated based off an easy ride (and in the title). I use it to just peer into the lives of friends as they've moved to different countries and continents.

breakdiving.io

Very tight knit community built around supporting each other and achieving life goals.

Halloapp.com is exactly this.

Whatsapp?