I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it(ca98am79.medium.com) |
I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it(ca98am79.medium.com) |
Hard pass from me dawg. If you don't know the business model now, folks like me are tired of trusting their data to randos on the internet without a plan for sustainability. Guaranteed to end up being just another data farm.
Neat you got the domain tho.
CTRL-F "android" "linux" "git" 0 results
sigh
PLEASE if you are developing only for the Mac ecosystem, you should be required to put (Mac only) in your title so the rest of us don't completely WASTE our time.
Good luck to the app, but I'll never use this.
The overwhelming majority of people I know with whom I want to have long digital conversations with are also a minimum of 500 kilometers away from me.
So just wanted to say I am rooting for you and I may be able to provide some acutely specific but embarrassing input(s) about how a Friendster 2 can happen, based on my Friendster 0 experience (it is definitely not about breaking up in high school where deleting profiles sends the news rippling to the whole universe) (it may involve learning that Indonesian black hats were scary and many and also how the social graph was uncached and always computed server side per profile visit). Now that you own the "Friendster" trademark, I hereby greenlight your soci-emdash-ability to manipulatively hint at the "possibility" of restoring profiles via the Friendster archive project, but keep it as a possibility until you big enough the patent trolls be phone tapping (this is really weird)
For me the special sauce that's been taken away from SM is just seeing my friends stuff, I want to see your dog with out it having to be a 2min video with onscreen graphics, SEO keyword optimisation in the post title and brand tags. Show me your fluffy dog updates, just dont force me to ask you about it first.
This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
I don't think that old business names should be "retired" and forever banned from use. After a certain amount of time the name should be free for someone to use again, and 10 years of non-use seems reasonable to me. The main concern with reuse is confusing consumers into thinking they are dealing with the old friendster, but I think consumers are savvy enough to realize that an old trademark rising from the dead often has nothing to do with the original, regardless of whether the current trademark holders purchased rights from the original, or claimed abandoned ones, as in this case.
His other business dealings aside, I don't have a problem with how he obtained/revived the friendster domain and trademark.
Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one.
Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, and whether the effort or investment put into the site is proportional to a ballpark of the value of a domain name. With exceptions, perhaps, for situations like domains that are also your name.
I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
* lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate
* taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment
* going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities
* qualitative usage can define treatment
* lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served
You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
Maybe I glossed over something
There is nothing inherently wrong with domain squatting. Lol. Blame the system, not the people operating within it.
That's not me, and hasn't been for probably 20 years.
But it's a neat idea regardless.
Warning bells. Slippery slopes. I think we should know by now that social networks do not mix well with the advertising business model. It would have been nice to see that eventuality ruled out explicitly here (PS: for the future as well as just for now).
Love the app, I’ve already had some photos shared with me!
on instagram, there is a social disincentive to unfollow people and you can also make someone else unfollow you in a couple ways (the button that does just that, as well as blocking someone for a second and unblocking them), doing these actions has a real cost to confrontation. people you thought you would never see again will see you again and say "I thought we were following each other???? oooo :O ... ooooh >:O"
you are making that activity a first class citizen, with no presumption of ill will behind it, this has value to it
- Make a blog about this on the domain. I'll follow!
- What do the logs say re: traffic? I see lots of links to the domain from articles about social media c. 2012
- What's your tech stack??
Ofc it's probably for the better if it's to have a chance to spread at least a little.
Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119
Build the platform, then find out how to make money on it later.
Cool to see someone did
Make the social network private, end to end encrypted, not harvested by your servers
Facebook launched in 2004. They always had ads.
Each user gives itself some field of interest, maybe its makeup, maybe its molecular biology, maybe it's something else. Then the system finds similar people with same interests. There are no subreddits with abusive moderators, no rigid containers. Just that you get content you are interested in based on genuine people. Then you can like talk to them about these things or see them posting about the stuff
and you get separate feeds for each kind of stuff,probably ai categorization
If you can resurrect Old Spice, why not try it elsewhere?
Friendster was not the first social network.
sixdegrees.com had it beat by 5 years.
Firstly, it doesn’t seem to work for me and my wife - we hold the phones together but clicking start does nothing (and we’ve accepted Bluetooth etc).
Secondly, I wonder if you’ll have a massive chicken and egg issue with the physical feature. I get it’s the main feature but could you overcome it somehow initially while still maintaining your long term “gimmick”? Like could you allow people to connect with the first X friends (5? 10? 20? Whatever that can get virality and flywheel going) or connect with as many as you want virtually for the first X months etc. You could even have the contacts fade away slowly if they don’t get verified in person etc. You might want to model out different strategies (and be extremely conservative) otherwise you’ll be relying on lottery-level luck. Good luck anyway though :)
>My wife and I met on OkCupid. I wouldn’t have my kids without it.
But OkCupid didn't require people to tap their phones together in order to be able to chat in the app.
I run an iOS-only app that Serves a small, specific demographic (and is free. It does not generate any revenue). It’s been shipping for a bit over two years, and has just over 1,000 users. I seriously doubt it will ever get more than a couple of thousand (a rounding error, for most folks around here). I did test it with 12,000 users, so it should handle the anticipated load.
I am writing the 2.0 version, now. I think I’ll add the “tap to connect” feature, and probably QR codes, as well.
While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.
Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also, I'm not sure about the personal attack and aggression. I only described search engine optimized ad spam pages with strong words. It was OP's decision to build this crap. Nobody, not even he himself argued against that these spam-pages have any value besides making him money.
I'm genuinely surprised that OP seems to not realize his past success story might be nothing to be proud of. I am also genuinely surprised that we, as a society tolerate this kind of behavior, and I actually wanted to have a discussion about this. The second post, I answered his question how I think we should deal with that and unfortunately mobbing is the only way I can think of. Again, I was open for discussion and put in alot of "I'm not sure, this is how it looks from my view" words. In the third post I tried to clarify that it's the seo ad - fueled, and that I consider that similar to littering with profit, which I guess is illegal in most countries.
A day later it still looks to me like I made a few very reasonable arguments. But sadly very little debate has been going on besides the typical low effort partisan comments. On that note, I'd like to point out that the karma system very much encourages these partisan comments, cause unfortunately solid argument are usually received much worse than snarky remarks.
If you'd like a heuristic to assess whether you're doing that or not, I'd say it's the combination of denunciatory language with second-person voicing (i.e. explicitly or implicitly addressing "you").
None of that has to do with making an argument - it's just directing aggression toward the other person. If you'd like to make your argument in a principled, neutral way, that of course is fine.
an article that spends most of its time talking about the sunshine and roses of purchasing domains from a domain squatter, even if you are a domain squatter, is an article about domain squatting.
hugely value-added activity, and a well-earned increment.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
OK.
If so this is a meta-or-dead social network.
Making it federated etc. would make me trust it more.
What is the benefit of that perspective? It's just social media. If it goes away tomorrow, no real loss. Use it accordingly.
I just realised federated helps re. censorship but not privacy/secrecy needs.
If say, Valve started a social network I would consider using it because they've had decades to screw up Steam and they haven't. It is a bit outside their wheelhouse though.
This random guy though?
The idea that anyone would sell any project for 1bn is kinda nonsense, if a project looks worth buying for 1bn to someone, it may look to be worth keeping to the people who made it or are in control of it.
… 11 years going for me. Good on you. I don’t have any other social media accounts. I’ll do my best to join up on this one. Wholesome.
I think a better alternative would be a phone number.
You only give your number to friends, which aligns with the brand and product concept.
Allows more of your friends to join via your address book, good for the app growth.
Might also mean indirectly you can’t follow a non-personal page which also aligns to the brand and product concept.
These, to me, feel like artifacts of a bygone era, now replaced by the boiled down version - group chats with friends. Telegram has every feature you need in a platform and you get the joy of "circles" as one poster mentioned, by simply having different group chats.
Plus it's not exposed to the public.
One of my very best friends lives in another country. We speak nearly every day, but I haven't seen them in person in over a year.
Another of my friends lives on the other side of the USA. We speak a few times a week, but I haven't seen them in person in about four years now. And that was only because their mom lived nearby. His mom moved, so it's unlikely we'll see each other except once a decade when we do our friends trip to Vegas.
I have other very close friends who I almost never see in person.
My point being, having to tap phones is cool and all but not a great measure of the strength of friendship.
I am convinced that this weird Phone Tapping thing may be the next evolutionary step from both social networks and the dead Internet theory (evolution not meant jokingly i.e. both naturally selected and the baby only got the recessive regressions).
The real solution hinges on maybe a future Turing award or Fields medal on physical cryptography for auth/integrity/privacy... but even without that. This is how Facebook got its "grassroots" userbase, from elite students verified via .edu email.
If a Friendster 2.0 actually doubles down on this physicality, and actually concentrate its efforts on making the very act of having to RE-TAP the physicality of a social connection, for example your friends may have an option to fund your trips to meet together if about to get disconnected.
Or of course it might end up being Facebook 2.0 and sell your Physical data to Cambridge Analytica 2.0 to make Grok beta emperor of Great North America CoProsperity Sphere
Those who are in domain name business knows that because it affects the value of every expired/operational domain.
Somewhat anonymous, short in time, one to one, with the potential to connect afterwards on outside channels. Possibly only one conversation a day allowed, and possibly only available to pre set contacts.
And then it gets stolen and has a trip around the world, meeting new people.
But the “tap phones” thing wouldn’t work for me.
Most of my friends and family live halfway around the world from me. I visit the states every couple years, and make a point of seeing them when I can, but the reality is I live here and they live there (a dozen different theres in half a dozen countries)
Those are the people I want an app like this to keep up with. But they’re the people your app won’t even let me add as friends.
> If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it.
Did you tap phones for OkCupid? The type of network you are building does not work that way -- you will not build the same types of connections in-person as you can online. I hope it goes well, but it's not the same type of thing.
I understand the sentiment - but this would make it useless for my closest friends - we live in different cities and countries now - and it would take years to fill in the social graph. We would all have to travel and meet everyone else.
I suppose this is alleviated by the talk to a friend of a friend feature - but does sound like it partially excludes friends with limited mobility.
And yes, also one more excuse to visit faraway friends.
Anyway, I digress, it would be great to connect and exchange ideas if you have the time? I really like the idea of fading connections.
> a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online
my skin crawled. I live a fulfilling, creative life. I'm married, have kids, the whole nine yards. My best friendships are with people I know almost entirely online, or haven't physically seen in years because we live on different continents.
I have little interest in most of the people I see regularly, because we're friends only because our kids are in the same classes.
Why people automatically think that social media should be like facebook and you should be global entity with billions of users? Wouldn’t actual social - in the literal meaning of the word - media mean that you share cool shit with maybe 3-10 of your closest friends who you actually see and hang out with, who are local to you? If you have an online game community, maybe you should meet once a year for IRL beer to tap phones? Perhaps we don’t live in a global village after all, perhaps we are are dumb tribal monkeys with super computers in our pockets?
* Tapping Phones * Confirming Phone Number * Confirming Email * Connected via Other Platforms (Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc)
As far as maintaining a friendship by tapping phones, again, I would make the friendships a constant and graph / rank intimacy by how often you tap phones as well as how connected you are to your friend (phone, email, connections on other networks).
I'd make it so you could tap a phone, you know their phone number, you know their email. Importantly in my eyes, you shouldn't be able to navigate to a profile and just ask to connect as that'd mean you could do that to people you don't actually know (whereby knowing is inferred by you knowing some amount of their personal info such as tap, phone, email).
I'd stay away from your last option of 'other platforms', per my other reply below in that those platforms allow you to connect to anyone/anything. There is nothing in them that say this connection is inherently personal vs being generic.
The problem I see with not using a phone number as I described, is that you'd be connecting to any old social profile - could be Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
None of those are inherently personal, it'd open up Friendster to be not materially different to any other social network as those networks don't have the concept of a personal connection - they are just generic connections (some are personal, many/most are not).
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.
A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.
Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.
If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.
Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).
If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?
In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.
Again, there's no alternative that meets your original criteria let alone your additional ones.
The intimacy levels can be IRL (when you tap phones), Phone (when you friend via phone number) and Email (when you friend via email address). You could also measure the intimacy hierarchy / rank by keeping track of events (should events become a feature) you attend with other friends.
There are a lot of projects I would sell for $1m, but it is little enough that I would carefully consider for anything I've invested serious time into
though id have the utmost respect for someone who could hold onto the possibility to threaten the facebook/instagram/snapchat moat, realistically i don't think anyone in here could stick to the ideals so strongly.
it's not even a valuable thought exercise. if this thing were to gain any traction at all it's assuredly gonna get acquired. you gotta be tech-buddha to resist that.
The domain would dominate sign-up flows.
> So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.
I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)?
I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.
So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.
So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."
[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]
In particular, if someone on the internet tells me they’re making $x a month from spammy ads on a squatted domain, I immediately discount the claim substantially due to bullshit. I increase the discount rate if the person making the claim is trying to sell me said domain.
That's obviously an upper bound, because those domains won't make $9000/year forever. But valuing them at $10k if they make $9k/year is equally unsound. Not to mention the domain is worth more than its ad revenue. You could also end up selling it to a company that came up with the name and saw that the domain is available for purchase for some reasonable 4-5 figure amount (like in the example of this very article, where someone buys a domain for a five-figure amount)
Obviously there is a lot we don't know (is the $9k pure profit or are there substantial costs? How likely is the domain to sell?), but it sounds like the seller got the better end of the deal. He got more than $40k in value, in return the author got a deal he could afford
The buyer takes on substantial risk because it's easy to fake the numbers, and google updates can tank the site at any time.
Also, most sites will require maintenance/upkeep to keep earning, or they can tank quick. Even if they have got evergreen content, without updates google might drop their search ranking.
Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.
That's not investment, that's just the cost of upkeep. It's possible you simply cannot afford to keep up with that expense rate, but the fact remains that it's net profit. With a $100k investment and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you lost $91k. With a yearly $100k cost and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you earned $9k. No matter how you slice it it's a money-printing machine. The question is much it cost you to buy the machine, not how much it costs you to run it, because you'd be a fool to turn it off.
For a moment I thought maybe the app was US exclusive or something and not available in my region.
But following the link from the post worked fine and I could install it.
I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
Anyway, installed the app finally thanks to the link.
Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site
If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.
See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"
I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge.
Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?
If the connect with friend interface also had a QR code for app download and could trigger a connection between our accounts upon download, that would remove enough friction that I could start recommending this to my friends on the fly.
I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.
1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA.
2. Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
3. Save yourself a lot of money by building it on top of the Nostr protocol. Run a relay yourself if you want guaranteed reliability. Run a Blossom server for media. Use email for auth and store people's keys for them if you want a traditional UX. Don't worry about what's on Nostr already, just build your own thing on the protocol.
Let people come and go as they please and don't lock them in. They will love you for it later.
Cool project. Have fun!
Constructively, of course (if you care for feedback devolving ramble-y):
Could almost see myself using a web app version of this for kicks. But can’t sign up for another network (though would be happy to link a self hosted project, if I could stumble through setup). Apps don’t feel private (Apple neglects to offer basic firewall/other features), and not sure how someone would look at me trying to get them to register somewhere… maybe the phone tap pitch is enough? (Especially if it’d allow one-tap registration for friends inviting new friends, because the phone bump allowed for some data transfer.)
Anyway, understand self hosting is ostensibly permanently destined to be unpopular but somehow feel if the pitch were “be your own network, tap the phone, use this Friendster infrastructure/instruction set to link your networks”, I’d be more tempted.
Thank you for keeping it not evil!
Also discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924178
if op is really serious about fixing social networking he needs to figure out a way to operate it that wont enshittify.
ie, public good, not for profit, something like that.
as is hes already signaled he intends to enshittify it eventually ("premium features"..?) which to me is a non-starter.
the problem is that a successful network beyond a certain size like this needs funding. its unfortunate but this needs legal /compliance, moderation, even marketing...
those things aren't free, but you could imagine ways to pay for them. Id totally accept a small subscription fee for a network like this if paying that fee could guarantee privacy, and that the person hosting all my data would not be looking to squeeze every dime of value out of me as a user.
anything less than solving the funding problem and you are just saying you will become facebook (or get bought by them). no thanks.
In this case the domain Friendster.com was bought, and a trademark was conceded (a new different trademark), I don't know precisely the implications of the trademark though, I think it's a different trademark and you still cannot imply that you are a continuation of the previous trademark holder, it's just that you are given monopoly over that word as a trademark.
Now, is that different than buying "Friendster"? A really interesting legal question, I think it is, and I think it has relevant implications, I don't think you can for example restore the website as it was and pretend a continuation as you would if you bought the company.
Honestly if the prior Friendster company itself was bought - including all the assets, codebase and historical documents (no user details) that would've been such an incredibly interesting read.
Buying the domain and getting the trademark is still cool, just not as cool.
I think that it will probably be fine if they compete in the same space of a social network, doesn't look like someone is going to go after them, the company that would have a claim against them is defunct, so even if they have a legal argument, who would raise the case? If the owners do so under their personal name it's even a weaker argument.
So in practice, in this case, subjectively I believe that it's effectively very similar as buying the company.
If you want a business model, require payment for long-term subscriptions or large celebrity/news accounts, but you have to overcome the network effect first. Maybe have a dozen or so permanent connections to start with, like MySpace's 8 priority friends.
You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
I looked into this a while ago and I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds of these services and even ones you can host yourself. No idea how well they work though.
I guess in today's age you would just schedule an agent to check the website every day.
And thus ensured your social network won't have 72% of the world on it... And locally for anyone outside the USA, a far higher percentage.
This is why we need laws regulating mobile platforms. Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you use your phone for, or what apps you can give to your users. Doesn't work that way for PCs, shouldn't work that way for computers in your pocket.
Isn’t it insane that Apple refuses for an app to be listed on the App Store if it is intended to be niche? If true that’s pretty shocking
They don’t want the App Store filled with app that can’t be used by the vast majority of people that might see and download it.
Yeah, but that wouldn't be an option for this app obviously.
> They don’t want the App Store filled with app that can’t be used by the vast majority of people that might see and download it.
Then they should add alternative methods. Instead they are actively sabotaging such efforts, for example by the EU. Want to distribute an iOS app in the EU through the web? Yeah, as a requirement you need an app with 1m annual downloads[1] already in the AppStore before they allow you to do that. Which completely defeats the point.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
Then again presumably there are plenty of organization specific apps that are also decidedly exclusionary
I have this guy whom I used to be in touch with but now we meet every seven years randomly - happened two times already in completely different places and we're due for a meeting this year.
I would rather maintain this connection, because it's always fascinating to catch up after years.
"in todays fast paced business environment.."
the incentive structure on medium is so busted. just people churning out half-working insights to look good for job interviews or promotions, it's like the worlds laziest portfolio. it straight up isn't any sort of bastion of knowledge-share.
makes things like https://beej.us/guide/ an absolute treasure
The guy wants people to meet in person rather than doing social media the normie way.
For the record, the feature you describe was first introduced on Samsung phones 14 years ago - and later removed, likely after poor adoption. Because Apple "reinvented it", it's now planned to be reintroduced on Android too.
[0]: in ancient times when server meant an actual server
But, my rule of thumb is you don't really need to worry about laws from places where they don't have real jurisdiction on you. If they filed suit, would you rather respond or make a note to never visit that place / would you be ok if all your users from there were blocked from contacting you by law?
How is this any less awkward? "Oh do you have the new Friendster app?" "Friendster? Isn't that from the 1900s?" "No, the new Friendster, see you download it, register, then we bump phones...."
Maybe just because I'm an autistic introvert, but the idea of asking someone to exchange numbers is terrifying enough, but at least this is an almost universal social ritual that people understand implicitly. I ask if you want to keep in touch and exchange phone numbers. I do not need to explain literally anything else and the other person almost always knows what I mean, how to do it, and what thin social relationship that implies. And if they don't seem to understand or are hesitant, but are otherwise coherent and cogent, I take the message that they don't want to keep in touch.
Now add a new app to download (iPhone only), a new social network to register, a new social ritual... Are they being hesitant because this is a new app or because they don't actually want to keep in touch? No thanks.
The first result is a sponsored result, and even after Friendster is indexed, if they don't pay apple's extortion-rate, the first result will still be for some other social media app.
Ads in the app store are malicious. There are people who have searched "Ledger bitcoin wallet", clicked the first link (a malicious app who paid apple enough money to be 'sponsored' for that search), and had all their money stolen.
You can search apps by their exact name, identifier, anything, and App Store will not find them for day+.
My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.
App Store search is fucked. Hilariously, Apple is at least non-discriminatory - try searching for any Apple app, and they will also be (at best) in the second slot after "sponsored" crap.
Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.
Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.
If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.
(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)
Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO
I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.
Either way, you badly mischaracterize generational differences in grieving and digital life. Gen Z and younger millenials are vastly more inclined towards memorialization of deceased loved ones and (physically & digitally) archiving their content than any generation. See also the uptrending of stated preference in burials over cremations in the same generation. There are many reasons for this but at least in part it is probably a reaction to the ephemeralization of both digital and physical life.
Also, my post was largely motivated by how OP brands their product. From their app store page and the blog post, it seems they will support photos, longer form content, and DMs. In such a setting, ephemerality needs to be in your face, otherwise you are setting up users for unpleasant surprises. It's common sense.
But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow?
It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.
That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful.
Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.
For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.
It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.
The tapping phones feature wouldn't allow me to do this.
You could say the same thing about leaving the house.
Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/
[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...
I’ve worked on a platform for social media apps. When the social network had a native iOS app, a native Android app, and a PWA, users chose iOS about two thirds of the time, Android about a quarter of the time, and PWA about 10% of the time. That’s across all users, including desktop, so the PWA actually had an unfair advantage.
People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs, especially for social media.
Such a conclusion cannot reasonably be made from the data you have presented. It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.
But yeah, that comment is a bit disconnected to majority of the population.
Misses the point completely. The entire idea is that this enforces in-person meetings, which QR codes do not.
Its a damn shame Google nerfed it after forcing it on people who werent asking to be forced into it. Google Plus was a very tech heavy Social Media platform, if Google had half a brain they could have built their own serious LinkedIn alternative.
It's a damn shame. I feel like Google giving up on Google+ and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.
opt in probably would have been better, like just default everyone to one circle and make it obvious how to split them up after you're a bit more comfortable with the platform
they made a bunch of other obvious blunders like attempting to force real names and spread them to youtube, mandatory account linkage etc etc but i think there were probably just too many conflicting high level voices at google trying to set direction
Facebook now has 'Audience', which is quite analogous to 'Circles'
Arbitrary labels are great ... until they're not.
This is a weird comment because it treats connections like they're only an asset for the person being followed.
The people doing the following aren't even considered. They're supposed to continuously re-follow the people they want to follow?
I don't see any upsides to this for anyone. I'm not reading social media every day. I don't want the network to automatically expire my follows and force me to remember and re-discover who I want to follow all the time. I don't want the people I follow feeling like they desperately need to pursue relevance instead of just being themselves.
If Selena Gomez is "socially irrelevant" then why do you care that she has 400 million followers? What does this take away from you in any way?
That's more work than even following someone, because it asks for confirmation or pops up a separate modal to unfollow, which it doesn't do for following someone. And so I don't even bother.
This leads to stale social networks and algorithmic timelines.
What does this mean? Like in practical feature terms and benefit to the end user?
Your system kills the social networks ability to act as someone's modern day rolodex of contact information of previous acquaintances. What do they get in exchange for that?
An ideal social network should not have any agency of its own, period. If your feed is too crowded because you follow too many people, then so be it. It's your problem, you did this to yourself. Only you know how to fix it for yourself, if you do even want it fixed in the first place.
Did that weird guy from 3rd grade show up? He sure did.
I know this wasn’t the point I was supposed to take from your comment but I’m liking this idea
Persistent irrelevant celebrities are a real thing, but those two wouldn’t crack the top 500.
You can be married to each other and your posts won't show up on the other person's feed (there's a post on HN about this)
In that sense, maybe this is Facebook doing its part for domestic harmony…
Ultimately, users define their network in current-day social media and the relevance of any celebrity or other person within it.
400M people still find Selena Gomez relevant to themselves - she’s simply not relevant to you. I asked Gemini very simply “is Selena Gomez relevant” and it responded with essentially “more in 2026 than ever.”
I'm pretty sure there was a Black Mirror episode about social scoring dictating peoples value/relevance. That was a good place for such a concept, because letting social media sites dictate someone's relevance is just weird. Relevance is a personal opinion, and should remain that way. People are free to stop following others. It works, and isn't dystopian.
You're of course welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
To request unlisted distribution for your app, send it for review as usual, then file a special form [1], and mention that in the review notes.
Source: I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school. Its audience is, indeed, not of Apple scale: the school parents living nearby. Apple refused it as 4.2 and only agreed to publish it as unlisted, which I was okay with, because sharing the link between the parents was not a big deal. Google had no problems with publishing the Android app normally though.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/unlisted-app-distributio...
Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
I get it that people want more freedom from their iPhones but the thing about consumer devices is that they are an expression of a certain philosophy of how computers should work. Being a walled garden is one such approach. If you don’t agree with how a device operates on principle, you should not buy it—there’s Android or derivatives. You’re also likely to be a power user who’s in an incredible small minority because iPhone sales keep getting better every year and the walled garden approach has market (as in free market) validation.
Now, if your objective is to regulate monopolies, I think that the policing should happen in the supply chain and production side instead of the consumer software side. You don’t have more options than iPhone and Android because big players like Apple and Samsung have captured manufacturing facilities with long-term exclusivity contracts, making innovation in the space prohibitively expensive. But the law shouldn’t dictate what sort of computer innovators are allowed to build.
They already do, one of the reasons it's so hard to make a smartphone is all the FCC regulations on radios.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
The future is one where everyone can, theoretically, install anything they want, but they get banned from everything should they actually do so. Rooted system? Attestation fails. "Oh no, looks like someone tampered with the system". Can't access your bank account. Can't communicate via WhatsApp. Can't watch something on the streaming services. Can't even play video games.
Discrimination against "untrustworthy" devices, where "untrustworthy" means not corporate owned. Leading to complete ostracization.
(Technically besides the point, but that is a broad statement)
People are becoming more aware that they don’t want a corporation in control over this essential near ubiquitous technology.
I see no good reason to follow a “it’s a corporation they can do whatever they want” mindset
There are standards for interoperability and user-friendliness with all kinds of devices, and we should expect the same from modern devices.
It would have been pretty peculiar and unacceptable if your telephone in the 80s couldn't call your neighbour because the telephone company just decided to not make them interoperable, why shouldn't it be the same here?
(The only exceptions are government-granted monopolies.)
Starting a network effect product like a social network where you exclude half the social graph seems like... quite a decision.
But with so many people vibe-coding apps, I do think it'd be good if Apple simplified the experience for non-developers. I made a stupid little rhythm game ("Headbang") this weekend that is controlled by AirPods head movement and I'd love to share it with two people and two people only. They would run it once and then never again.
The WayBack machine shows the redirect to the ad page offering the domain for sale.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231018214628/https://friendste...
So doesn't seem like it was serving ads anyway
I’m responding to somebody who presented the following with absolutely nothing to back it up:
> Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
The stats I’ve seen point in the opposite direction and I see no reason not to share that. Why are you giving them a free pass to share their opinion with zero stats but pull me up when I actually base my opinion on real stats? Looking past somebody saying “a surprising number” to complain about somebody sharing actual numbers is bizarre.
> It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.
No, I’m talking about hundreds of apps hosting a wide range of independent communities. It wasn’t a single app for a single demographic.
This should not be a controversial stance. Saying that people prefer native to PWA on the desktop is not a controversial stance and the advantages for native on mobile are even more pronounced. The very existence of the App Store came about because when Steve Jobs told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone they should be web apps, the market demanded native apps.
PWA uptake is dismal. People strongly prefer native apps.
Mentioning it here, though, tends to get pushback from folks that write Web apps. They don’t want to admit that native apps have more capabilities than Web apps; even if that’s a bad thing, because of security risks.
Enough to be motivated to proceed with due diligence.
Whatever any potential buyer considers that to mean for them.
How much are you trying to sell the domain for?
Uhh...about $100k.
It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated
> [...] would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them.
I suppose getting special "NFC card" permissions when they already struggled to get the app in the store would have been a bit much.
[0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction
Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work.
Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.
Maybe if there's a "celebrity" that displays it on a live stream, that's a bigger issue, but there could be other mechanisms to dissuade this behaviour. Perhaps you could only add one friend with one QR code.
I agree with you, I don't even think that needs to be argued, we without a doubt hate forgetting things, but we also hate eating our vegetables. We do hate a lot of things we probably shouldn't. We are perpetual hoarders, as a species we have the bad habit that we're not very grateful for the problems we don't have as a consequence of things we don't keep. We're not very good thinking in terms of absence.
That's why Marie Kondo sold a ton of books and got a great Netflix deal simply by teaching people how to throw stuff into the garbage. Civilization is great at record keeping but not doing too well on the social bonding front, or in the words of George Carlin: https://youtu.be/MvgN5gCuLac
If you're going to move fast and break things and connect the world full steam ahead (and damn the consequences like what happened in Myanmar) your platform better be absolutely rock solid but Facebook doesn't even do that. Its implementation of 'connection' is laughable
The lesson here is not to invite your whole friend list.
Maybe the lesson is to curate your friend list and don’t keep as a “friend” anyone you wouldn’t want to hang out with in person.
This, the numbers they show are often a result of a pump that isn't sustainable. I've watched a bunch of youtube videos from people on the buying and selling side of things, and it's readily apparent that the values are temporary for most of the sites. The scam sites outnumber the legitimate long term ones and both are sold on the same platforms.
At what multiple would you be comfortable considering selling? If revenue has dropped 85% from its peak, have you identified the cause of the drop? Has it been steady that past five years? Do you have a record of the time spent on it, or does it just feel minimal? How much of revenue is from ads vs subscriptions? Is it sticky mainly because a user can’t export things and import them to Google Calendar or something?
Is it custom software, heavily customized software, or are you basically selling the calendaring component of something like Citadel or Horde? What languages are in use? Does the buyer get just the site or full ownership of the codebase and the rights to derive new products and services from it? Does it come with the domain and trademarks?
Are you selling outright, or are you reserving some royalty for yourself?
What does the handover look like? Does the buyer just get an email with URLs and login credentials, or do you plan on familiarizing a buyer with the whole thing?
The original goal was to aggregate all these local events into a single searchable index and serve up local ads alongside. I never really got that part to take off, though I did get a very early patent for local search on the web. Since then, calendaring libs have come along which allowed many site-builder tools to offer a built-in solution.
The primary reasons for declines are 0) Not as many people build raw sites anymore; people migrate to things like Wordpress or Wix) 1) Google showing less profitable ads and 2) Webmasters w/ a popular site can remove ads via a subscription (which are drastically underpriced; some are still on a legacy $9.95/year). Everything is exportable (and importable) via iCal if desired. Buyer gets everything, w/ no residual royalties to me. I'd have to have an active role in the handover since it's all bespoke code. The buyer would need some level of Java+T-SQL since I don't want to teach coding from scratch.
I love my users and many rely heavily on the site - it's meant to be very simple to use and I tend to draw an older demographic that doesn't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles. 26+ years is a lot of time and I don't have the passion for it I used to. I had a recent health issue and my wife is concerned that she wouldn't know how to close this out gracefully if the worst ever happened.
Camera, and point it at their changing screen (or both at the same scene at the same moment). Not too intrusive.
GPS, but that would require location permission. Intrusive.
Audio, but that would require allowing microphone. Intrusive.
We tested it one time with like 10 phones and everyone bumping each other / the wall as a control, in the same room and it nailed every actual pairing and ignored the others. The wiki has more, but lacks the subjective experience of how magic it was.
It works in isolation and fails miserably when trying to do a big demo of it in a conference talk when attempted by dozens of people in the same room.
But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted?
And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?
"SEO is a $100 billion industry" = your opponents have a 12 figure war budget.
But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004.
The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.
Dowsing a user's circles from their public information and Gmail inbox seems like a perfect task for AI.
Self-defining all of the semantic grouping metadata was too much onus on the user.
Not everybody has the patience to curate and groom their social circle labels and memberships. That feels like a full time job.
I spent way too much time stressing over how to define my "circles". It was not a good experience.
I totally agree that should be swappable, but what is your point? Apple doesn't even allow installing stuff outside their store in most places, and had to be legally forced to do it in some because of how ridiculous that obviously is (thanks, EU!). And even there they still have some control with their notarization process. Android is wildly more open in major, meaningful ways, despite some failures.
You can’t just send tens of thousands of emails via your typical email service.
This (EDIT: this app) is iOS only right now. And I hate the normalisation of giving websites access to Bluetooth and NFC.
How do I build an app for my iPhone locally and run it without ever connecting to their servers? I can do that for my phone running linux or for my phone running android, but on iOS I have to get signed by their servers to run code I wrote.
Linux respects my freedom to have my data exist locally, to build and run open source apps, and to modify the code on the devices I run.
Apple does not. They don't let me use their ecosystem from Linux, they do not let me patch the iOS kernel and run a modified version on the devices I run, I can't even access the source code for the macOS kernel.
Apple's filesystem abstraction and lack of something like android "intents" also makes it wildly difficult to do "local-first" computing where files are shared between apps cleanly.
People like iPhones and MacBooks, not Pages or Numbers.
You hit me right in the gut, are we long lost siblings? Lol
Windows Phone died because MS didnt do enough to build the app ecosystem, and bailed out too soon. I also feel webOS was a lost opportunity too - in some ways it was just too ambitious for the hardware of its time.
I was one of two non-MSFT I knew of that had one.. and I bought it because an MSFT employee was showing it off and I was convinced. The concept of Tiles was great and Cortana was respectable. It felt comparable to Siri and way better than Google.
I used it for a couple years until the apps I needed started disappearing due to lack of updates.
WebOS needed WASM and a lot more to be successful. I think WASM/WASI is to the point that the next major platform build out can use it.
I loved Google+ - it was like Facebook without the dark patterns. So of course, nobody was on it (which I didn't dislike exactly).
The signals are working as intended. More people will know Kim K than Sweeney because Kim K is more popular and has had more time to be more popular.
why am i talking about kim k on hn lol
Having fading connections equates relevance with popularity.
They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app.
They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it.
1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word.
2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.
That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political.
X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off.
I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.
- For you: Fully algorithmic, shows stuff even from people you don't follow
- Following (recently): Chronological posts from people you follow
- Following (popular): Algorithmic ordering just from people you follow
Is this an alternate front-end (Nitter) or shorthand for X/Twitter?
We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API, if they are already using Google's attestation API.
GrapheneOS's strategy for raising their profile and being seen as more legitimate is that they've formed a partnership with Motorola Mobility, who will be manufacturing Graphene compatible phones. <https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...>
Corporations don't use such things for technical reasons. Their reasons are political. They want control. The "security" they talk about isn't the user's security, it's their own security from the user.
> We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API
And until they do, GrapheneOS is permanently at risk of being shut out of the market.
And even if they do, it just means we've become dependent on GrapheneOS. They won't trust our keys, only those of corporations. Our freedom is still compromised.
The truth is there are two reasonable platforms, as long as that is the case we should apply scrutiny.
An absurdly dishonest comparison. Which you (hopefully) knew when you made it.
Even more comparable is postal rules: at least here, there are very explicit rules about opening someone else's mail, or even destroying it. Even if postal/courier services are businesses, they have to operate within the boundaries a society sets up for them.
And finally, you can take it even further: some "businesses" operate on the fringes of legality and sometimes illegally too (think loan shark operations, casinos, betting markets... but also "protection services" and similar).
If you say that people prefer native desktop apps to web apps, you’ll get a lot of agreement – people complaining about Electron, Slack using up all their RAM, etc.
If you say that people prefer native mobile apps to web apps – a setting where the advantage of native is even more pronounced – then all of a sudden you get a bunch of people who simply refuse to believe that this is true.
I’ve noticed a lot of overlap between the people who reject this and people who dislike the App Store for other reasons (e.g. locked down devices). I think the difference between accepting people prefer native on desktop vs mobile is not primarily driven by facts but by ideology. People who dislike App Stores are inclined to prefer PWAs and they prefer to believe everybody is like them despite it being pretty obvious this is not actually true.
https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/07/23/11/newFile-3.jpg
and not like this, anymore:
https://headlineplanet.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/M...
A user on a app is more valuable since you get a lot more data on them, and can stop their ad blockers.
“Getting data on people” is just not that attractive for most apps. Are Reddit motivated by things like that? Sure. But it’s just not that valuable for everybody else.
You know what is attractive? Giving customers what they want. And customers want native apps.
Pretty sure she founded or runs skims? She's Armenian, daughter of a famous lawyer in LA. Kanye. Sex tape. Early with the reality tv. I too did not seek out any of this knowledge!
Most just be a generational thing. Sweeney is still baking. She's actress from euphoria of which i didn't watch. That's about as much as i know. and the jeans ad controversy.
Are other competitors banned where you live?
The guiding principle should continue to be that manufacturers and retailers don't get to control the second hand market or dictate what users do with the things they purchase. Digital controls used to thwart the owner's freedom should be outlawed.
Absolute, unmitigated bullshit. You are not forced to buy an iPhone by anyone, ever.
> “it’s a corporation they can do whatever they want”
Then perhaps you should make the absolutely tiny mental leap to "And I don't have to buy if it doesn't work the way I want it to."
Apple has 32% market share - pretending you don't have any other choice is utterly fallacious nonsense.
However, I'm completely blocked by Apple app store review. There's no way an app designed for 30 people would pass.
I can't get an internal app onto people's phone. I could release it as a test app but that might get blocked at any point.
I can at least release a PWA but as I understand even that might get notifications blocked at any point, with no recourse, and of course functionality is highly limited.
So the goal here is clear: don't allow people to write small apps.
Apple can then make sure they are only allowing apps that required enough work, both initially and ongoing, that nearly everyone will feel the need to charge, or include ads, and then Apple gets a 30% cut every time.
As for why a car company's app passes, obviously they don't want anyone with enough power to challenge this in court, politically, or in the media. So those get a pass.
Don’t know how known this is. But we use it mainly for internal testing.
> The Apple Developer Enterprise Program allows large organizations to develop and deploy proprietary, internal-use apps to their employees
> Your organization must:
> Have 100 or more employees
Again, it's clear that they're providing this out so that organizations with power don't have to start a fight, while small organizations can't do anything.
Even aside from that, it's clearly going to be so much work that we wouldn't be able to do it. I'm the only developer at the company, I cannot get bogged down in Apple review processes.
The mechanism to add a web app to the home screen has remained pretty unchanged from iPhoneOS 1.0 (2007) to iOS 18 (2024) – you tap the action button (sometimes called the “share” button despite it being a misnomer), then you tap “Add to Home Screen”. It’s the same as adding a bookmark, printing, or sharing the link with somebody.
That is the process they designed before the App Store existed when they were telling everybody if you want to build apps for the iPhone then they should be web apps, so I don’t think you can reasonably consider this process to be intentionally difficult.
This changed slightly in iOS 26 because you need to tap the meatball icon to bring up the menu and pick “Share…”, but given that this only happened six months ago, I don’t think that’s what you were referring to by “in the past”?
> They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app.
Absolutely, users do not know or care what technology you are using so long as it meets their expectations of use. Users are going to the app store as a discovery mechanism for "something that gives them an icon on the phone to get to that thing", most have no clue what "native code" means.
2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
It being an app gives those people an experience that matches their normal use of technology, and I think they're probably a majority of users.
Plus, if the parent feels like making an app instead of a web page, who is Apple (or you, or I) to discourage that?
If Apple supported the beforeinstallprompt event (available in Chrome since 2015) then people would have same experience as installing app [0]. Instead, you must create a wrapper around webpage and submit thru App Store.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy to make one), but parents use the app much more often.
Source: consulted for a company that had a PWA and paid me a lot of money to make it a native app because their users didn't know how to use the PWA.
Also, in the EU it just opens the site up in your browser, no lack of browser UI like you'd expect. Apple is wonderful.
Edit: It seems I never got the news they reversed course on that particular idea of theirs.
Your point about users not being used to this is very real. I didn’t know you could until some app author showed me.
It really is as simple as sharing a link or copy-pasting, but if you don’t know it’s a think, it disappears into obscurity in the menus.
There's still this funny business: https://developer.apple.com/support/alt-distribution-ux-in-t... & https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu
No url bar, no back/forward, no tabs, nor translation, no menu bar, no loading indicator, just… pressing down on a link shows the target url and offers open, copy link, add to reading list and share -which honestly looks like a weird oversight.
Unfortunately some other features are only available to PWA do it's a tradeoff either way.
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
And I like nice to use software.
My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.
The system was invite-based, meaning these people invited their friends. And those people invited their friends of friends.
The community was seeded by a very political base at its inception. The general feed the average user saw when opening the app was activist-political, furry art, dildos, and outrage. This continued for a year, I think?
This is not very welcoming to a general audience, and it severely knee-capped Bluesky's growth trajectory.
Here's the front page of Bluesky for a new user today:
Look how they hid the option to add a PWA to the home screen. Instead of placing the option next to "Add to bookmarks" after you press "..." (especially if it recognized the page as a PWA!), you have to choose "Share" (which makes no sense!) and then scroll up (at the same time it's non-obvious that you can even scroll up) past the option "add to bookmarks" (again) and then pick the 5th option "add to home screen".
Very obvious dark pattern at work here.
The Apple story on PWA is “Fuck ‘em until our last breath.”
But really, it's that Twitter shifted hard-right to literal Nazism, and so people left. Which is completely understandable.
At no point did I make this claim. Bluesky's user base self selected for left wing viewpoints because Twitter had taken a hard right turn and Bluesky, mostly by way of moderation, was unwelcoming to the right wing. So left leaning people had a reason to leave Twitter and a friendly platform. Right wing people had no reason to leave Twitter and a hostile platform with Bluesky.
