[coef2]

I miss the old days when Facebook was simply a fun way to reconnect with friend and family who lived far away. Unfortunately, those days are gone. It feels like an over engineered attention-hogging system that collects a large amount of data and risks people's mental health along the way.

[msgodel]

From the very beginning Facebook has been an AI wearing your friends as a skinsuit. People are only just starting to notice now.

[d_watt]

Perhaps naive to say, but I think there was the briefest moment where your status updates started with "is", feeds were chronological, and photos and links weren't pushed over text, that it was not an adversarial actor to one's wellbeing.

[labster]

Nah, not from the very beginning. Before the News Feed, The Facebook was great to find people and keep in contact. Following someone’s page too often was called Facebook stalking and was socially discouraged.

Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.

[arizen]

This is a perfect illustration of misaligned AI.

The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.

The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.

The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.

[rafaelmn]

They didn't even have algorithmic feeds from beginning, so no.

[IshKebab]

What delusional nonsense. What AI was Facebook using in 2005?

[cornfieldlabs]

I am building one with a chronological feed and no public profiles.

You need to already know someone to find them here.

Check out the waitlist!

https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/

Edit:

Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysR...

It's intentionally simple

[IshKebab]

Yeah... aside from all the very obvious problems with this (network effects, most friends aren't weird techy no-images types, etc.)... the moment has passed. Nobody is going to trust another tech company with their real name & permanent social life again. They've seen what happens.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

In addition to exporting one's contacts from Facebook in order to import them into an alternative, there should be a way to use whatever is provided through Facebook's "Download your data" to populate new accounts in the new alternative.

Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.

However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".

[fivestones]

Are you really planning to not allow photos? I understand your reasoning for why this works in places a group chat wouldn’t, and I have group chats that I wish could do what your site does (share things to all my friends but we don’t all have to have all the same friends). But something I really appreciate about some of those group chats, especially smaller ones like a group of three, are the photos that friends post. Usually it’s not low effort, it’s real photos of their real lives. I like what you are doing a lot but the ability to post my photos to show to friends seems like a must for me.

[motoxpro]

What is the difference between this and a group chat? Most people have < 20 people that they know well enough to give a secret code to unless you're a creator or personality, in which care we are back to snapchat.

If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?

Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.

I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better

[pulkitanand]

Your landing page talks about all the right goals. postx is a good placeholder name, I recommend ideating a better name for launch. looking forward, wish you the best.

[rglullis]

> PostX is a private, no-clout, no-AI social network for close friends

What can you possibly offer in this space that can not be done with a messaging group on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix/XMPP ?

   - They are invite only
   - They are not public
   - People share updates in chronological order

[DSingularity]

Risks people’s mental health? I would say it is pretty obvious that FB and IG are bad for people. Some may have a natural mental fortitude and can survive it without instruction but for the rest of us we need some instructions on how to use these platforms without compromising key aspects of our mental health.

[absurdo]

I’d like to see a proper study on this that can be replicated before I jump on this train. And I’m a supporter of Jonathan “the kids are not alright” Haidt but let’s not kid ourselves his work is questionable throughout.

It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.

[throwaway83094]

Rose-tinted glasses. Here's what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about his own platform in 2004:

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks

[guicen]

I have similar feelings. In the early days, Facebook was more like a cozy corner of the Internet, where you could see the latest news from your high school classmates and the dinner photos posted by distant relatives. It was very relaxing. Now when I open the app, I feel like I am being manipulated by the algorithm, constantly pushing you to click and watch things, and I can't stop. It has become smarter, but also more indifferent.

[suzzer99]

I have Fluff-Busting Purity, I'm part of a bunch of Facebook groups, and I only browse on my laptop. I pretty much only see what I want to.

[ulfw]

myspace back in the day was a creative open canvas. You could put whatever random stuff on an HTML page and that was "you". Super unstructured, wild. Whatever.

Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.

[xyst]

These days I treat Facebook as a marketplace for offloading lightly used items.

Social media is dead to me.

[cornfieldlabs]

Facebook marketplace has surprisingly large number of listings and in my country not even dedicated marketplaces can come close

[idiotsecant]

What a coincidence, I use it as a market for buying lightly used items.

[robocat]

Provide wildly different features: get everybody hooked on a different feature.

That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.

[danielbln]

> Social media is dead to me

You know, HN is social media.

[figassis]

Would a friends and staying in touch social network even succeed today?

[cornfieldlabs]

I am trying to find out with the one I am building :)

I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts

[imhoguy]

From early days of FB I remember it nagged to read all my addressbook/contacts. It was always data hungry. It wouldn't grow so quickly and big without gray ethics.

[neepi]

Read Careless People. It was never about that.

[n1b0m]

Don’t forget supercharging the spread of hate such as the harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar

[arrowsmith]

Who even uses Facebook anymore? I don't know anyone who posts to their own profile anymore, and I'm part of the generation where literally everybody was posting every detail of their lives to FB as students.

For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)

The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.

[TrackerFF]

I don't know where you live, but at least here in Scandinavia FB is still the de facto "one-stop shop" as far as social media goes.

Sure, younger people use other apps / platforms, but society as a whole here is way, way too invested in FB.

[morkalork]

Marketplace :/

[droopyEyelids]

This is a real Rip Van Winkle style take (posted with gentle humor)

[wkat4242]

Yeah the one difference with some other enshittified things is that I really have the impression that Facebook was always meant to go this way.

It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.

Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.

[npalli]

So Feb 4, 2004 (founding) to September 6, 2006 (newsfeed). LOL.

[oulipo]

What I don't understand is how come they could make such a crappy product, almost everything is totally unusable both on the web and the app, it's pathetic to be a Meta engineer at that point