Social media just for friends
Facebook was, once upon a time, a place you shared photos and stupid little opinions just for your real friends, work friends, and maybe some of your family. It was awesome.
But the platform is built for seeing posts from anybody and everybody across the web. Ultimately, it is built for generating revenue through advertising.
I would like a new social media platform that is geared directly toward the small groups of people who actually know eachother, and actively prohibits public figures, brands, news orgs, and governments from participating.
Platform Limits / Rules
This platform could provide hard limits to how many friends you can add. Maybe 50. That might be a bit too many, or maybe too few? This already prevents the platform from working for major publishers.
Next, it would not allow sharing of posts. PERHAPS your immediate friends can share with their immediate friends "Oh, hey look my boyfriend got a new dog!" kind of thing. But none beyond that. This would prevent any kind of virality.
I think some kind of 'Groups' feature could be worth including, but they would have to be small, specifically intended for local groups like your local sports club or D&D group or church congregation, maybe 50 or 100 people max. None of the massive groups like Facebook has with thousands of disconnected strangers.
In this vein, Event pages should be included, but with the same kind of restrictions. These are NOT for public events. We want birthday parties, family reunions, and board game nights.
Oh, and I GUESS it should probably have a direct messaging feature. UGH.
And we could bring back customizable home pages like MySpace had, except let's NEVER bring back the 'top 8 friends' crap.
Also, the apps and website have to be nice looking and easy to use. And no ads. NONE.
Money
And for money - A single, optional, and reasonable paid upgrade. You buy one upgrade and get all the paid features. Let's say $50 for a year? Lower if possible.
Ideas for paid features:
- Creating a Group
- Create more than 3 (maybe 5) Events in a year. (for free, you could still do your Birthday and a couple holidays. Regular posts could be made for event planning, but the Event page would be a nicety)
- Photo storage - Free accounts could share photos with their posts like usual, but perhaps a paid account could have photo albums and be intended for use as photo storage (this is probably out-of-scope and could run into cost issues though)
Stuff like that.
Inspiration
I had this idea a long time ago, and I think I forgot to write it down. But Bear's model makes me think this thing could actually be viable. The goals are entirely different than today's social media platforms. It would be far less profitable. But it might be sustainable, if it were good. It could probably even be built on top of something like Mastodon, but I don't know, nor do I care what the tech is.
Oh and I have no plans of building this. If you like this idea, please go for it.