I just wanted to have an open brainstorm with the folks here to rethink potential designs for a social media platform that might actually move people off of existing platforms but also has privacy built in. Here’s some starting thoughts floating around in my head.
Privacy
A common issue today with privacy is that a lot of our lives are lived on existing social media platforms that exploits user data for AD intelligence and screws creators.
I really like the idea of Tor-only social networks that builds in web of trust identity which would largely enable both anon and human associated accounts. My hope is that similar to existing social media accounts, your reputation, associates to your real identity or not, would help you land a job, build influence or infamy in communities, or find love. Therefore you would be more careful with accounts that you’ve spent time building a reputation for (like a character you’ve leveled up for years in a game).
Engagement / Usability
Social media hasn’t innovated much recently and though I appreciate the OSS federated clones like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube and Loops, all struggle with difficult signups and no financial incentive or alternative reason for creators to stick around.
It seems like a real open space to do even the smallest x factor idea but layered with privacy.
Brainstorm
Obviously were not designers so this would be assuming a lot of trying to at least match usability and features of existing mainstream networks while considering:
- How you would design the privacy portion of this app?
- How would you handle usability tradeoffs?
Are there examples of existing privacy centric social media apps that do well with these tradeoffs?
Imagine we’re targetting non technical “normies” with the hope to replace Meta, X, TikTok, Reddit, and/or YouTube. We already have the magic idea to draw this crowd, what would we need to get this to be a recommended app by PG?