Ask HN: Why there are no non-profit Social Networks?

[bhavin]

At each successive facebook backlash, I find myself asking why there are no non-profit social networks? A quick search revealed that there are a few attempts at this, but none exceeding 50k users. And that looks to be pretty much it.

Does anybody have a greater insight as to why there are no non-profit projects in Social Networking domain such as in others (e.g. wikimedia, craigslist etc). Not counting Diaspora since its a technology, not a hosted Social Network + its not complete (and there are doubts being raised whether it ever will be).

As far as I can think, there are 2 major costs involved:

1) Infrastructure and bandwidth: It could be from few thousand dollars to several million depending on number of users. From response to Diaspora's kickstarter, one can infer that people are definitely willing to donate for a 'noble' social network. And donations would be in proportion of user-base, so this doesn't look like that big an issue (feel free to correct).

2) People cost: The salaries etc. Since there are many developers out there who would love to get involved in such a project, doesn't look like there will be shortage of people willing to contribute (I know I am one). When it comes at hiring full time employees, this can be run much like a startup (minus equity). I am sure there are many developers even here on HN who would work on such a project without asking for any equity.

I guess people would trust a non-profit Social Network more than they do any commercial one. I find it surprising that there have been no attempts at this. If anybody is willing to work on this, I would more than love to contribute/co-found.

[a3camero]

Want to get started? I did some work for a US client that wanted to develop a political tool for people to organize themselves. It was released under BSD. I can dig up the code and repost it if you'd like (original site expired). It was developed in 2009.

[UPDATE] Found it: http://districtbydistrict.summerhilldesign.com/source.zip

[LarryA]

Here are a few glimpses from my perspective of a long-time techie at an NPO.

Many NPOs can't afford having their staff "surf the net all the time." Those that have the most opportunity are usually managers or higher up which need to network more than support staff. So in that respect that cuts the number of participants quite a bit.

NPOs aren't the same, I went to a NP software development conference, I was from a private NP doing community services with state and fed monies. Many of the others were community/social/political NPOs that are more geared for advocacy, etc. So finding a common thread can be a challenge... and many NPs are in competition for similar funding or causes.

Of the social networks I've seen that mixes well is the forums etc. on TechSoup, the draw is everyone needs tech support and Tech soup has donated software/hardware for NPOs. I've seen others, like one on Ning but that fizzled when the costs went up - NPOs are really tight with their budgets.

[lysol]

Until there are cross-network trusts, people will stay on the social network their social circle is on. They can be horrible, slow, riddled with privacy concerns, but if your entire family and entire circle of friends is on there you're going to feel a great deal of social pressure to participate.

[bhavin]

I completely agree, but on the other hand, facebook was at one point of time far behind myspace. one of the reasons it became a huge success is that the myspace had even bigger issues with privacy etc when facebook was considered nice and trustworthy. And its only after facebook became clear market leader, the user backlash started/became frequent.

[kris_schlesser]

I've been thinking along the same lines and have already drawn up some concepts for what I think would be a killer non-profit substitute for facebook. I have also founded a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit, so I have some expertise when it comes to running a non-profit. Shoot me an email if you'd like to explore the idea further. kris [at] oowom [dot] com

[staunch]

Craigslist is not a non-profit. Those dudes are raking home tens of millions per year in profits.

[pavel_lishin]

So, your real question is, why isn't there a non-profit Social Network that's as big as Facebook?

[bhavin]

umm, what I meant when I said there have been attempts is - those seem to be not full hearted with no outside support. E.g. there's no open-source social network project I know of which plans to run through people's contribution (financial and technical).