How to run a small social network (2019)

I run a small social network with absolutely no technology at all. Usually consists of six or seven of us sitting in a coffee shop or a bar.<p>It was never broke so stop trying to fix it.

A Discord server seems to meet many of my “small social network” needs. The hacker spirit of this post is fun but it can be hard to get friends to value it as much as the person running it might.

Related:<p><i>How to run a small social network site for your friends</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29470565">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29470565</a> - Dec 2021 (209 comments)<p><i>How to run a small social network site for your friends</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28604023">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28604023</a> - Sept 2021 (1 comment)<p><i>How to run a small social network site for your friends</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20384970">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20384970</a> - July 2019 (60 comments)

Social networks are platforms.<p>They get more valuable the more people are on it. Imagine a platform with 100 people on it. Nobody&#x27;s going to put effort into putting content on that.<p>Now look at something like X, Youtube, TikTok. It&#x27;s a storm of content, because that&#x27;s where the eyeballs are.

This push for everyone to have their own empty social network site (not distinguishable from 1 billion other sites on the same code) is very strange.

&gt; It behaves just like Mastodon with one important change: the only letter you are allowed to use is &quot;E&quot;.<p>I loved this, this indeed is what open source is about!

Has everyone forgotten about phpbb? (Or whatever the slightly more modern forum software is…) Historically forums are the most successful small social networks.

Another shameless plug: I created the first social network for Gemini and have been running that for a couple of years now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martinrue.com&#x2F;station" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martinrue.com&#x2F;station</a>

&gt; So what do you, the reader, do next?<p>Sadly (for me), this section only lists alternatives like Mastodon and Pleroma (for Twitter), Pixelfed for Instagram and PeerTube for YouTube. What I would like to see is something like Facebook Groups, which is topic&#x2F;community focused, allows anyone to post (assuming admins allow), allows anyone in the group to respond or follow, etc. Even something like Reddit may be similar. Twitter and Instagram clones are good for following a few people and occasionally interacting with them, but to me they seem cumbersome with the &quot;one to many&quot; nature of their networks&#x2F;graphs.

Shameless plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rings.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rings.social</a> (GPLv3) is my attempt to build a Reddit-like social network.<p>This is my second attempt after OpenDolphin [1] (demo [2]), but the problem remains the same: finding a good amount of people to bootstrap the social network.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.opendolphin.social&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.opendolphin.social&#x2F;</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.opendolphin.social&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.opendolphin.social&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been building something that could be described as a &quot;professional social network SaaS&quot; [1]. Most of the users are VC funds that connect founders in a network.<p>I think the thing that is most under-appreciated is keeping people engaged over time. Facebook kept people coming back because it was the universal network. As social media fragments, people assume that others will just stick around in a Discord&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;Circle&#x2F;etc. But, the reality is that ~75% of people stop returning after a month. And, most social networks see that 90% of members read instead of engage - so the format needs to work for people who prefer to just read.<p>I solve this in my product by sending a email summary every day to keep people informed. My opinion is that the defining characteristic of any social network software is how it keeps people engaged over time - whether it&#x27;s email newsletter, SMS, push notifications, or desktop pop-ups. The time and place people see notifications is closely related to the network audience, and how notifications work as audience size scales matters. A software that assumes that people will just remember to come back without reminders is going to taper off slowly in engagement.<p>We&#x27;ll never have another universal social network like Facebook in 2010. So, as networks splinter - think about when and how often people need to engage, and work backwards on the software from those needs.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booklet.group" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booklet.group</a>

I run a Slack server with about 80 people, maybe a quarter are regularly active. Is that a social network? I’m not on FB, Instagram, X, etc so it feels like my only social network.

This is my attempt to tick all boxes. Small codebase, two languages (Go and SQL), easy deployment and no frameworks&#x2F;ORMs, ActivityPub support and a lightweight text-based interface.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dimkr&#x2F;tootik">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dimkr&#x2F;tootik</a>

When app.net finally went away Dalton and Berg open sourced a fair bit of the underlying technology. Two small social networks were born for people that did not want to give up the communities they had found on app.net. PNut.io uses the same backbone that app.net did. I’m not sure about the underlying software that 10centuries.org uses.<p>Both of them feature microblogging but also offer other features. 10centuries also allows regular blogging and pnut has private messages as well as #mondaynightdanceparty. Every monday 9:30 PM EST people log into mndp.tv and request videos. We all watch them and comment.<p>It’s a lot of fun. Not being open to every rando on the internet does lead to a better experience.

With all the shameless plugs in the comments, anyone know of a social media network that focuses on following topics instead of individuals?<p>I&#x27;m talking about reddit back when it was still good. You follow interesting topics, celebrities can have their own topic, but you cannot follow everything an individual user does.<p>Following everything an individual does is kinda creepy to me, I feel like we&#x27;ve taken a wrong turn there with social media.

Step 1:<p>Create thousands of fake accounts and create active daily engagement among users

Start Telegram channel. No big tech bs and very easy to run.

&gt; I think a good CoC should be specific enough that it is actively repulsive to some people. And frankly, the more people who are repulsed by it the better.<p>I&#x27;d say that in this case, the best version is the one that names explicitly people who are allowed and others need not apply.<p>But then again... It&#x27;s actually an interesting train of thought. How should I repulse, in one simple sentence, both right-wing and left-wing nutsoes? How can I make sure the result of this repellent is not an empty set?<p>But then again, maybe only the nuttiest ones should be repelled, and the rest will read the room...

We have a group that solves this problem with a free tier slack instance.

Recently I&#x27;ve seen &quot;small web&quot; sites referred to generically as &quot;tildes&quot;, despite some sites trying to claim that name for themselves (e.g. tildes.net).

(2019)