> 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.
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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can search apps by their exact name, identifier, anything, and App Store will not find them for day+.
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.
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"
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.)
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.
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
I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.
But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow?
It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.
That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful.
Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.
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.
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.
You could say the same thing about leaving the house.
Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.
- 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.
[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/
[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...
The tapping phones feature wouldn't allow me to do this.
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?
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.
I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.
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.
Cool project. Have fun!
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.
But yeah, that comment is a bit disconnected to majority of the population.
Misses the point completely. The entire idea is that this enforces in-person meetings, which QR codes do not.
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.
Thank you for keeping it not evil!
if op is really serious about fixing social networking he needs to figure out a way to operate it that wont enshittify.
ie, public good, not for profit, something like that.
as is hes already signaled he intends to enshittify it eventually ("premium features"..?) which to me is a non-starter.
the problem is that a successful network beyond a certain size like this needs funding. its unfortunate but this needs legal /compliance, moderation, even marketing...
those things aren't free, but you could imagine ways to pay for them. Id totally accept a small subscription fee for a network like this if paying that fee could guarantee privacy, and that the person hosting all my data would not be looking to squeeze every dime of value out of me as a user.
anything less than solving the funding problem and you are just saying you will become facebook (or get bought by them). no thanks.
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.
I guess in today's age you would just schedule an agent to check the website every day.
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.
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.
It's a damn shame. I feel like Google giving up on Google+ and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.
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
Facebook now has 'Audience', which is quite analogous to 'Circles'
Arbitrary labels are great ... until they're not.
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?
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?
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.
Did that weird guy from 3rd grade show up? He sure did.
I know this wasn’t the point I was supposed to take from your comment but I’m liking this idea
Persistent irrelevant celebrities are a real thing, but those two wouldn’t crack the top 500.
You can be married to each other and your posts won't show up on the other person's feed (there's a post on HN about this)
In that sense, maybe this is Facebook doing its part for domestic harmony…
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.
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.”
You're of course welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/unlisted-app-distributio...
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?
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.
They already do, one of the reasons it's so hard to make a smartphone is all the FCC regulations on radios.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
People are becoming more aware that they don’t want a corporation in control over this essential near ubiquitous technology.
I see no good reason to follow a “it’s a corporation they can do whatever they want” mindset
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?
(The only exceptions are government-granted monopolies.)
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.
(Technically besides the point, but that is a broad statement)
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
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 again presumably there are plenty of organization specific apps that are also decidedly exclusionary
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.
OK.
The guy wants people to meet in person rather than doing social media the normie way.
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.
Starting a network effect product like a social network where you exclude half the social graph seems like... quite a decision.
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.
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?
[0]: in ancient times when server meant an actual server
One of my very best friends lives in another country. We speak nearly every day, but I haven't seen them in person in over a year.
Another of my friends lives on the other side of the USA. We speak a few times a week, but I haven't seen them in person in about four years now. And that was only because their mom lived nearby. His mom moved, so it's unlikely we'll see each other except once a decade when we do our friends trip to Vegas.
I have other very close friends who I almost never see in person.
My point being, having to tap phones is cool and all but not a great measure of the strength of friendship.
I am convinced that this weird Phone Tapping thing may be the next evolutionary step from both social networks and the dead Internet theory (evolution not meant jokingly i.e. both naturally selected and the baby only got the recessive regressions).
The real solution hinges on maybe a future Turing award or Fields medal on physical cryptography for auth/integrity/privacy... but even without that. This is how Facebook got its "grassroots" userbase, from elite students verified via .edu email.
If a Friendster 2.0 actually doubles down on this physicality, and actually concentrate its efforts on making the very act of having to RE-TAP the physicality of a social connection, for example your friends may have an option to fund your trips to meet together if about to get disconnected.
Or of course it might end up being Facebook 2.0 and sell your Physical data to Cambridge Analytica 2.0 to make Grok beta emperor of Great North America CoProsperity Sphere
I think a better alternative would be a phone number.
You only give your number to friends, which aligns with the brand and product concept.
Allows more of your friends to join via your address book, good for the app growth.
Might also mean indirectly you can’t follow a non-personal page which also aligns to the brand and product concept.
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?
* 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'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.
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).
If so this is a meta-or-dead social network.
Making it federated etc. would make me trust it more.
What is the benefit of that perspective? It's just social media. If it goes away tomorrow, no real loss. Use it accordingly.
I just realised federated helps re. censorship but not privacy/secrecy needs.
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.
This random guy though?
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.
… 11 years going for me. Good on you. I don’t have any other social media accounts. I’ll do my best to join up on this one. Wholesome.
Those who are in domain name business knows that because it affects the value of every expired/operational domain.
- Make a blog about this on the domain. I'll follow!
- What do the logs say re: traffic? I see lots of links to the domain from articles about social media c. 2012
- What's your tech stack??
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.
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.
And yes, also one more excuse to visit faraway friends.
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.
And then it gets stolen and has a trip around the world, meeting new people.
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.
That's not me, and hasn't been for probably 20 years.
But it's a neat idea regardless.
Ofc it's probably for the better if it's to have a chance to spread at least a little.
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).
Love the app, I’ve already had some photos shared with me!
Cool to see someone did
If you can resurrect Old Spice, why not try it elsewhere?
"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.
makes things like https://beej.us/guide/ an absolute treasure
Build the platform, then find out how to make money on it later.
Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119
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
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.
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.
Make the social network private, end to end encrypted, not harvested by your servers
Friendster was not the first social network.
sixdegrees.com had it beat by 5 years.
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.
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.
Plus it's not exposed to the public.
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.
Neat you got the domain tho.
Good luck to the app, but I'll never use this.
The overwhelming majority of people I know with whom I want to have long digital conversations with are also a minimum of 500 kilometers away from me.
CTRL-F "android" "linux" "git" 0 results
sigh
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.
> 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.
So just wanted to say I am rooting for you and I may be able to provide some acutely specific but embarrassing input(s) about how a Friendster 2 can happen, based on my Friendster 0 experience (it is definitely not about breaking up in high school where deleting profiles sends the news rippling to the whole universe) (it may involve learning that Indonesian black hats were scary and many and also how the social graph was uncached and always computed server side per profile visit). Now that you own the "Friendster" trademark, I hereby greenlight your soci-emdash-ability to manipulatively hint at the "possibility" of restoring profiles via the Friendster archive project, but keep it as a possibility until you big enough the patent trolls be phone tapping (this is really weird)
> 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.
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
>My wife and I met on OkCupid. I wouldn’t have my kids without it.
But OkCupid didn't require people to tap their phones together in order to be able to chat in the app.
This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with domain squatting. Lol. Blame the system, not the people operating within it.
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.
