Hey HN,<p>I'm Daniel, founder of Thread.<p>I started Thread two months ago because I believe current social media and social networks are built in a way that harms our ability to meaningfully connect with one another. They're highly addictive, superficial, and socially isolating. They also run a reputation of violating user privacy and selling it to third parties.<p>I strongly believe in ad-free, private social networking as an alternative. It's all about building and maintaining relationships with the people closest to you. If this sounds interesting, please try out the app! It's still very early, beta software.<p>On pricing: I think advertising is out of the question. It's a strong misalignment of incentives in trying to deliver long term value for end users. I have some ideas here, but the most obvious thing that comes to mind is a subscription based service (say ~$10/year).<p>I would love to hear your feedback (questions, comments, suggestions) on what I'm building.<p>Reach out to me personally at daniel@thread-app.com.
Some blunt questions for you:<p>iMessage doesn't have ads (and honestly i cannot see it ever changing), but it does have one hell of an ecosystem. Why is yours better?<p>How do you propose to enter a very crowded space and get enough users to pay you keep the lights on when every alternative is free?<p>If you're actually a WhatsApp alternative instead of an iMessage alternative, why are you better than Signal? It's free, and they're a nonprofit with a warchest and really, truly no incentive to keep any metadata about you at all.
I like the effort, but honestly there's tons of apps that are cross-platform, free, and can do everything imessages can, but better. Telegram is just one example.<p>I see adoption as a biggest problem. I personally tried to migrate to Telegram and failed to convince even my own wife to give it a try, since imessages work for her and all her friends are there and why bother.
> Thread works seamlessly on iOS, Android, and web browsers. We're not a walled garden.<p>There isn't an API, data export, or a way to spin up my own Thread server. Thread is a walled garden.<p>Additionally, I can't find a way to delete my account.
I appreciate the effort but as a person who has quit all social media, these more intimate, private spaces are served by messengers. For me, specifically, it's Telegram and it does an absolutely bang up job of it.<p>You're going to be outstripped in sheer features here to say nothing of stickers, round videos, the upcoming transaction layer in the TON, bots for pretty much everything, so on and so forth.<p>Social media is just a name for "broadcast widely", which has never been my interest. Messengers are that smaller scale.