Social network for my friends

I started my fight with digital addiction 6 years ago, in 2020. And it’s been a tough fight. I am not always winning, but I can surely say that a lot of progress was made. I wrote a note on that (Digital Epidemic) and recently I heard an interesting quote:

You don’t want to realize in your 60s you’ve been living a boring life because you never wanted to be bored.

Anyways, let’s return to Friendly. One inevitable thing I had to fight were social medias. Since 2020 I stopped reading news: unsubscribed from all channels, public feeds, etc. But I couldn’t leave things like Twitter, Discord, Telegram. All my friend connections were living there.

And I always understood that some app to connect with people is not a problem on its own. The problem always was that they have to make money off of you. Therefore, all these platforms just have to:

• Show ADs to users, which implies collecting profiles of their users, etc.
• Show growth to their investors, which implies hunting a ton of developers that will basically do nothing
• People that work for company are mostly interested in their careers, not users. So they hack metrics and try lure users to spend more time in their apps, etc.

I can talk about large companies doing bad stuff for hours (I know it from my work experience), but I think you got the idea. And if you never thought about this, it’s you who are paying for all these inefficiencies. Company will make money on you and after all it’s you who are paying these giant monopolies.

But you know what? I’ve been doing software engineering for 10 years at this point and I don’t have to monetize everything. I can easily implement all platforms including native apps, web and backend. I saved up some money and can live without working for at least 2 years. And now I am willing to solve my problem with social media once and for all.

Different approach

We are fixing social media by implementing these concepts in one place:

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. True social interactions are never one-way.
2. No public content. People don’t behave genuinely when anyone can see their thoughts.
3. No numbers. Reactions, friends, comments. These are all metrics that people game to get more attention. We hide numbers and show who actually replied, put a reaction, etc.
4. No algorithms. We give people tools to find what they want to see; we don’t decide for them. Posts in the community are chronologically sorted, people in feed are random friends of your friends.
5. Multi-accounts. People have different sides of them. Family side, Real Life Side, Programming & Internet Side. We allow to create separate contexts if you need them.

You connect → Build up network → Only your network sees your content. People don’t try to get attention, but behave genuinely.

We don’t hurry

That is also one of the points that make our project stand out. We don’t need to make money. We do our research and build for people. We don’t care if that’s 10 000 lines of code per day or 100.

The reason for that is that I’ve never been using an app and thought “Oh, I wish it had 100 times more features!“. Or “Oh, I wish it was developing 100 times faster”. I genuinely don’t care about commits and speed of development of the apps I use, just do the damn thing professionally.

That is why we don’t use AI in our job. I am not alone, but even if I were, I am sure I can easily implement everything I need in a few years. People do indie-games, which is a much harder thing than some messenger app. Join us if you don’t want to develop AI slop as well.

On the other hand, we understand the inconvenience for our first users. But in the span of a lifetime… A few years is not much. And it’s alright if majority of the users are going to join later.

That’s the other thing. We don’t care about how many users we will have and how big this thing is going to be. First of all, we are solving our own problem. And to make it work for us, 100 active users is more than enough. And we already have quite a few! So, this thing already can’t fail for the developers.

Pricing

The last thing to address is pricing. If we are a non-profit and open source, we have to do money to host the infrastructure. But I can assure you it’s not that bad. Both dedicated servers and physical memory are cheap nowadays:

• 2gb RAM server can easily serve 10k requests per second and it costs $3 per month
• 1tb of flat storage costs just $10 per month

$13 is about as much as you will spend for a single dinner in the economy where I am. So, we are safe until we are very popular. Later we might introduce additional pricing strategies, including:

• Federations where people can self-host their servers
• Donations and ephemeral subscriptions
• Pay to use subscriptions

But there are 2 major points that we will always stand for:

• We are non-profit. Money will always stay inside Friendly and finances are going to be open-sourced as well as code is
• We are not spies. No ADs, no analytics, no data selling

Best case scenario for us is 5-10 devs having salary and a few cheap servers running millions of users. Where’s our guarantee that we will not grow into one more FB? That is open-source code.

Once we will try to became villains, everyone can fork us and continue this journey from the last checkpoint. And that is what will hold us from doing something like this. You don’t have to trust me, that’s mechanisms builtin our organizations that will make it inevitable.

No invite?

We already have quite a few features.

You can already create fancy profiles and make friends:

_{Profiles have full markdown + sanitized html support.}

And you can also chat with friends using posts and threads, reactions:

_{Posts have full markdown + sanitized html support.}

There is a long way to go. I am not sharing an invite here, and never will, since this is a public web. If you want to join this project and you like the values we state, contact me via friendly@y9san9.me

That is also a call to start chatting with me. I will review your messages and if we match, I will invite you as my friend in Friendly. I really like to talk with people, so don’t be stopped by this wall that was meant for bots.