Discuss possible niches for starting a new social networks; some ideas below include music, meets, malls, mashups. Feedback on any of these are welcome. More ideas are very welcome.

Please read the niches page.

Quotation to consider:

• "The social startups that have struck it big in the post-Facebook era have all started by carving out a different niche. That difference can’t just be about a site’s back-end architecture or business model, as with Diaspora (an open-source Facebook) or App.net (a Twitter without ads). The product itself has to fulfill a fresh purpose for its users, like sharing snazzy smartphone snapshots (Instagram), networking and advancing their careers (LinkedIn), or showing off their taste in fashion, food, and design (Pinterest)."

Discuss feeds and how to decide what the feeds show in terms of stories, posts, photos, etc., such as a linear feed that shows everything, or an algorithmic feed that automatically guesses what the user may want to see, or a customizable feed that lets the user choose options for what shows up.

Please read the feeds page.

Quotation to consider:

• "I wish there was a social network that could somehow avoid people competing to post the highest volume of popular content, so they could relax and focus on posting information about themselves that other people want to know. But even if you were somehow able to force people to just post about themselves, no third-party content, there are plenty of people who would make a meal of it by posting endless videos about their grooming regimen, their cooking, or cute stuff their cat does. It all just devolves into competing for attention."

Discuss data areas, such as who owns data, who uses it and how, who controls it and where it goes?

Please read the data page.

Quotation to consider:

• "We want to put you in control — and be transparent about what information we have and how it is used."

Discuss ideas for topologies of the social network, such as whether it is essentially centralized (as are Facebook and Twitter) or decentralized/distributed/federated (as is Mastodon and Secure Scuttlebutt).

Please read the topologies page.

Quotations to consider:

• "The only way social is going to work and be improved going forward is through decentralisation and taking our data out of the hands of a central repository where it can be used to target us, and is more vulnerable to breaches. Once we have that baseline the other problems can be solved by the communities themselves."

• "The whole issue with the first decentralised networks at the moment are their usability and accessibility to the average person. There’s a lot of work to be done on this. There are 1000s of people tackling the problem globally from the protocol level to the user interfaces."

• "Social protocols are the answer. They probably won't be the first answer. You need some of these networks with real traction (or at least one huge one) so they can derive a protocol from the greatest common factors between them. To preemptively make a protocol sans popular implementation has little value and often ends in low adoption. As we've learned, the success of a protocol is more about its popularity than its presence or quality. So I say let these networks gestate and once the market (of people, not money) starts picking winners, then begin your abstraction. And for those (of us) working on solutions to this problem space now, keep going. You don't need a committee or standards doc or whatever. You just need an awesome implementation."

References:

• Distributed social network - Wikipedia
• Distributed Social Networks - P2P Foundation

Commentary:

• Thoughts on federated social networks - by Matt Lee
• Decentralized social networks sound great - too bad they'll never work - by Wired)

Discuss names, such as whether a user should be required to use their real name, or can optionally use a fake name or pseudonym, or can optionally use an anonymous name such as a random token.

Please read the names page.

Quotations to consider:

• "We want people to know who they are connecting to, and we want you to have an authentic experience. So we require you to use your real name, as it would be listed on your credit card, government ID, workplace ID, or student ID."

• "Some people like to use fake names and pseudonyms. These are good for established alter-egos, such as people with pen names. These are also good for people who may need to protect themselves because they may be targets of persecution."

• "Real name policies are unreliable, impossible to enforce correctly, and disproportionally cause problems for ethnic groups and people with unusual names, multiple names, or cross-cultural names."

Discuss ideas about routes, such as how to reach people, places, items, resources.

Please read the routes page.

We use the term "route" to generically describe a way to reach people, places, items, resources, etc.

Examples:

• Email addresses: [email protected]
• Phone number: 1-415-317-2700
• Web page: http://reddit.com

We use the term "meta-route" to generically describe a route that contains another route.

Examples where each website URL route contains another route:

• Email address: https://www.example.com/[email protected]
• Phone number: https://www.example.com/1-415-317-2700
• Web page: https://example.com/reddit.com

Discuss privacy policies, including user rights, transparency guidelines, user rights, etc.

Please read privacy policy page.

Examples:

• https://policies.google.com/privacy

References:

• Hundreds of millions impacted by new Yahoo, AOL, privacy policies that collect emails, texts, photos

Discuss comparisons, such as similarities and differences versus other social networks.

Please read the comparisons page.

Example ideas from real people to consider:

Similarities to many existing social networks:

• I want a profile photo, like on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.
• I want to post an item, such as a status update, or photo, or link.

Differences from many existing social networks:

• I want to use a pseudeonym, not my real name.
• I want a personal page and a professional page.
• I want ways to do more locally, e.g. like NextDoor.
• I want to promote my small business to neighbors.

Versus Twitter:

• I want a longer username, not limited to 15-characters.
• I want long posts.

Versus Facebook:

• I want separation e.g. peers vs. news, work vs. home, family vs. friends.
• I want a pin area so I can feature my current interests e.g. links to music.
• I want to share with groups of people e.g. circles.
• I want more ways to shape my feed, e.g. more photos of friends, fewer photos of food.
• I want fewer ads and/or more-relevant ads.

Versus LinkedIn:

• I want to be able to apply for jobs more easily.
• I want to feature my skills, rather than feature my resume or CV.
• I want to follow company news, yet not get overwhelmed.
• I want to automatically connect to all my coworkers e.g. enterprise address book.

Discuss various policies, such as website privacy policies, security disclosure policies, code of conduct policies, etc.

Please read the policies page.

Discuss disclosure policies, including security reporting, bug tracking, responsible disclosure, coordinated disclosure, bug bounties, etc.

Please read privacy policy page.

Examples:

• Coordinated disclosure
• Protecting security researchers (dropbox.com)

Discuss communities and engagement ideas, such as how we can encourage people and groups, to help in a variety of ways, such as funding, creating, sharing, and coding?

Please read the communities page.

In the document you include two references to meta-routing:

• Could meta-routes make it easier to sign up?
• Could meta-routes make it much easier to automate account creation?

Could you explain a little more about what meta-routes are? The only reference I can find about it is including metadata in the routing algorithm, such as whether you need to be logged in to view a page or not.

Discuss security, such as spammers who send unsolicited commercial messages, hackers who steal identities, and masqueraders who create fake accounts and post fake news.

Please read the security page.

Discuss ideas for scopes, such as benefits, features, and a possible minimum viable product.

Please read the scopes page.

Quotations to consider:

• "What features and benefits are necessary to get someone to try a new social network? What can we build as directly as possible, to try our plan right now?"

• "Facebook has the most valuable triumvirate of requirements for a successful service: a huge audience, an huge pile of money, and huge group of smart employees. The result is a social network funded by advertising and virtual goods. They are, in a very real sense, the ultimate example of the minimum viable product: there is nothing there. Peek behind the curtain and the social network is held up only by its connections."

References:

• Minimum viable product

Discuss conduct policies, such as a code of conduct, community guidelines, group norms, user expectations, etc.

Please read conduct policies page

Conduct policies, a.k.a. code of conduct agreements, explain how an organization expects people to interact, and how to use group norms to provide better collaboration, more respect, and happier participants.

Examples:

• http://rubykaigi.org/2016/code-of-conduct/

Articles:

• How to Develop a Code of Conduct for Your Company

Discuss references, such as links to highly-relevant articles, blogs, commentaries, forums, papers, research reports, etc.

Please read the articles page.

Examples:

• Social media and its discontents by Cal Newport
• Paradigm shifts for the decentralized web
• The Search for the Anti-Facebook

Discuss ideas for funding, such as advertisements, donations, subscriptions.

Please read the funding page.

Quotations to consider:

• "The incentives created by an advertising business model are to essentially addict people psychologically to your product, and then to cause outrage cycles. You want to feed them stuff that either makes them afraid or angry, because when they’re excited by low level emotions like that, they share more stuff, they’re more active, they spend more time on the site, and see more ads, and they’re just more valuable to them."

• "Subscription sounds like it might be a good idea because it seems like it would remove the incentive to monetize personal information, but in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kind of useless."

Discuss ideas for implementation stacks, such as programming languages, application frameworks, databases and stores, application programming interfaces, etc.

Please read the stacks page.

Discuss programming languages and their frameworks such as:

• Popular tech e.g. React, Node, Ruby/Rails, C++
• Powerful tech e.g. Java, Kotlin, Clojure
• Progressive tech e.g. Ember, Elixir, Rust
• Mobile tech e.g. iOS, Android, React Native

Discuss databases such as:

• Relation-oriented e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server
• Document-oriented e.g. Mongo
• Speed-oriented e.g. Redis, Memcached
• Graph-oriented e.g. Fauna, Neo4J
• Vendor-oriented e.g. Google Spanner, Amazon Aurora

Discuss application programming interfaces (APIs) such as:

• Resource-oriented e.g. REST-like
• Graph-oriented e.g. GraphQL-like
• Object-oriented e.g. RPC
• Wire-oriented e.g. protocol buffers, thrift
• Publishing-oriented e.g. RSS, Atom, Pub/Sub
• JSON-oriented e.g. JSON API, OpenAPI, LD
• Semantic-oriented e.g. RDF, SPARQL

Discuss platform areas such as:

• Mobile vs. desktop
• Phone size vs. tablet size vs. laptop size
• Distribution on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.
• Distribution via Apple App Store, Google Play, etc.

Discuss organizational structures, such as organizing as a for-profit company, or a non-profit organization, or a governmental project, etc.

Please read organizations page

Article:

• We Need a PBS for Social Media: Instead of breaking up Facebook, America should create a public alternative.

Discuss audience possibilities, such as general public, niche groups, special needs.

Please read the audiences page.

Quotations to consider:

• "The social startups that have struck it big in the post-Facebook era have all started by carving out a different niche. That difference, Cross argues, can’t just be about a site’s back-end architecture or business model, as with Diaspora (an open-source Facebook) or App.net (a Twitter without ads). The product itself has to fulfill a fresh purpose for its users, like sharing snazzy smartphone snapshots (Instagram), networking and advancing their careers (LinkedIn), or showing off their taste in fashion, food, and design (Pinterest)."

Project management

Please read the project management page.

Discuss project priorities such as:

• This project is more akin to an ambitious web app, less akin to a blogging site.
• We value participation by many people and organizations.
• The security needs to be bulletproof and independently-verifiable.

Discuss project expectations such as:

• Prefer truly free technology over corporate-restricted technology.
• Prefer more-welcoming communities over less-welcoming communities.
• Prefer agile over waterfall.
• Prefer continuous delivery rather than using sprints.
• Prefer to use delivery throttles over all-or-none releases.

Discuss project tools such as:

• Planning e.g. Asana, Trello
• Dicussion e.g. IRC, Slack
• Prototyping e.g. Balsamiq, Photoshop

Discuss project methodologies such as:

• Agile, lean, kanban, waterfall, etc.
• Model, view, controller (MVC), data, context, interaction (DCI), etc.
• Functional code may be easier to create reliably and easier to scale up.

Discuss motivations within social networks, such as gamification, extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, etc.

Please read the motivations page.

Quotations to consider:

• "The more interactions your contributions generate, the more likely you will become a persona leader. Each milestone unlocks rewards, and adds layers of fun to your social connections."

• "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth."