During the summer of the 2020 lockdown, I did a lot of thinking about social media. I wrote “We all want to leave Facebook. Everybody hates Facebook. With good reason. Political reasons. Monetary reasons. Ethics. etc. Once upon a time we wanted to leave because we couldn't promote to our own "followers" without "boosting". Now we want to leave because we understand that social media is partially responsible for the destruction of the earth.”At the time some people stuck with Twitter. That’s now X. Others say the solution is in the decentralized fediverse. All I knew is I wanted to be able to post and share. Short “tweets”, longer rants. Pictures, links etc. I wanted my friends to see them and I wanted to see my friends. I didn’t want to see promoted posts and sponsored posts and attention-grabbing meaningless reels. I didn’t want an algorithm. I wanted my friend’s content, in chronological order.
I thought hey, I built a 7000 member yahoogroup called nyhappenings, surely I can convince a few people to join the ideal social media site. I looked at competing sites and they were all terrible. =Then I tried looking to build one myself using some of the now popular “no-code” tools, but I was too lazy or they weren’t good enough for me to make something that worked how I wanted it to work. How is that?
Here's my simple and brilliant idea of how I think a social media network should work. I'll say this again here without fear that somebody will steal the idea, because if they do, then great! I'll join that site!
Give me a timeline. Chronological order. Posts can be as short or long as you like. A “continued within” link is added automatically once you hit a certain limit, so walls aren't filled with endless posts. If one person posts too much, maybe a “see more from…” link appears instead of multiple posts from a single person per day.
There's no algorithm. You see all the posts, in order of posting, from your contacts. Here's the fun part, and this comes from what I was planning for nyhappenings 2.0. At the very top there's a "filter". It limits or expands what you're seeing.
The default setting, is it shows all your connections. The next option is to show your connections, and public posts from their connections. That is how you get exposed to things outside of your immediate network. Maybe in the future you can make groups with labels (friends, co-workers, high school friends, people with good record collections) and click to limit to those.
Now when you post you decide on the reach. If you have it set to only friends, only people you're directly friends with see it. But if you make it public, then friends of friends can see it.
Maybe there's a "trending" posts, some way to see things that are gaining traction. Discovery of friends of friends public content, or interactions your friends are having outside of your network is available easily, but doesn't drown out the primary timeline.
Eventually add groups. No ads. No suggestions. No reels. Every post can be formatted however you like. Maybe it's rich text/html. Maybe it's links. Maybe it's a whole essay. Maybe it's a short video. Maybe just a photo. Maybe just a word.
I don't know, those are some of the things I was thinking about. Events and calendars might be cool too. In the 5 years since I started thinking about this, social media has gotten worse. Everybody wants to be able to interact with their community without dealing with Zuckerberg or Musk or Dorsey or whatever other terrible tech-bro seems to control all of this. And you have things like Bluesky but that’s trying to recreate Twitter, not Facebook. Then I learned about vibe-coding. I don’t want to get into a whole AI debate. It’s terrible and it’s useful. I found a site that let’s you use simple language to describe a website and within a few hours I built a social media site much closer to my ideal than I had been with the no-code tools. What I’d like to do is get some people to join and test it out, work out some of the kinks. Then get more people to join and see if we can’t get any community traction. Then once the proof of concept is in the pudding, raise a billion dollars and build the site for real and finally supply a functional replacement for Facebook/Twitter/X/Instagram/friendster/orkut/livejournal/etc.
If you've read this far and you’re interested in joining and seeing how it looks, let me know and I’ll send you a code. It is very buggy and needs a lot of work, but would love to be able to test it with other humans. Once you join you can generate a few codes to invite others, but it’s very buyer-beware currently so the whole thing is a work in progress experiment, everything can change. Even the name, which is currently Friendeteria. Got a better suggestion? Post about it.
In the few weeks since posting that, a few people have joined and a fewer people have done some posting and testing and tire-kicking, including our stalwart hero Ned. In an effort to get more people to check it out and test it out, and open a dialogue about whether it's tenable or even a good idea, I figured I'd start a thread here.
― dan selzer, Wednesday, 18 June 2025 16:28 (one week ago)