Astro Hacker News - We accidentally recreated old Facebook

brenschluss |next [-]

Ah, see, you didn’t recreate it just because of the interface; you recreated because it’s currently a high-trust social environment, because your friends and family are using it, because they know who you are. Old Facebook was high-trust because we all were naive and trusting.

Perhaps the question is how to continue to create high-trust environments from a social perspective, not an interface perspective.

troad |root |parent |next [-]

This is an important observation, but there were specific technological choices that Old FB made that were conducive to becoming and staying high-trust. For so long as your feed was just your friends and family, you'd effectively perceive FB itself as the place where your friends and family are. It was ingenious.

Facebook figured out how to scale this high-trust environment infinitely (mutual friending required, limiting engagement to friends or mutuals, etc), and then threw it all away when your feed stopped being "your dear friend Jenny got married" and became "your dear friend Dua Lipa wants you to buy her new album".

Ntrails |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> because your friends and family are using it

No. My family was _not_ using it. The people who attended the same university were. Some of the change was when everyone had to moderate their output for different social contexts/audiences.

amr_shawky |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I think the 'sending posts directly to people' which mimics the way memes are sent on instagram helps a lot with this. If I know exactly who the audience is for what I'm sending it definitely makes it more comfortable.

andrepd |root |parent |previous [-]

Oh come on... "Chronological feed of your friend's posts" and "algorithmic mix of your follows, paid content, and shit optimised to keep you engaged" are two VERY different beasts. This is why Facebook of 2008 is different from Facebook/instagram/etc of 2026, not because the people or communities were somehow different.

_carbyau_ |root |parent [-]

Once Facebook removed "chronological" as a feed option I was less engaged. I couldn't connect with my people meaningfully anymore.

shawn_w |root |parent [-]

I don't even see most of my friends posts until a few weeks later. It completely kills any way to meaningfully keep up with them via Facebook.

Lots and lots of thinly disguised ads, though.

danielrhodes |next |previous [-]

The reason Facebook is where it is now is that when it was novel there was a lot of engagement. But as the novelty wore off, it became clear that your friends were not going to be able to produce the amount of interesting content you’d need to stay engaged. Most people probably don’t have enough friends on FB making the problem worse. In addition, Facebook’s privacy model requiring a double opt-in friendship makes it hard to add more friends.

So they started to loosen things: you can follow others, posts can be public, your feed becomes a mix of posts in your network and friends posts, etc. Now it is resembling Reddit. Numbers go up!

That is to say: these pure friend social networks start off with the right intentions. But with a similar product and incentives, you’ll end up right around where Facebook is now. If you want a different outcome, you must start from a different place.

ghssds |root |parent |next [-]

Old Slashdot had the right ideas. You could mark anyone as friend or foe. If somone marked you as friend, it was your fan. If someone marked you as foe, it was your freak. Then you could make your friends', foes', fans' and freaks' posts more or less visible, as you wished.

There was no "like" for posts but a much more evolved system: you could brand posts as interresting, informative, insightful, funny, underrated, overrated, flamebait or troll.

Slashdot was never a social media, but it sure had a few features that could have been used to turn it into an interresting one.

everybodyknows |root |parent [-]

Did Slashdot reveal your identity to those whom you had "foe'd"? That's where the real-life trouble can start.

amr_shawky |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I think your analysis about the feed is correct, but the intention isn't to create a traditional feed to scroll for hours, we have plenty of those that do a very good job already. Its more of a different interface for effectively a chat platform where you send links/posts from different parts of the internet directly to a few people you know. The purpose of the feed stops becoming something to scroll to discover new content and more like instagram chat in a unified place, but instead of memes it can be whatever you want.

sharts |root |parent |previous [-]

The problem is when something that has some marginal utility to people becomes something that MBAs see as a tool to extract as much $$ from people. And then the enshitification begins.

tim-projects |next |previous [-]

As a none American I point out that WhatsApp groups have functionally replaced old Facebook for a long time.

amr_shawky |root |parent |next [-]

I completely agree, my only issue with WhatsApp is that when I get a message, I need to read it immediately and its 50/50 whether its important or just a random link to something. For me at least, the reason Instagram messages work is I can ignore the notification because I know its definitely not important and just something funny to look at later.

keane |root |parent [-]

This is an issue. iMessage needs a way for a group thread to be set and labeled as low-priority collectively and preemptively (not just individuals muting the thread).

My friends and I have silly group threads but they fizzle out fairly quickly because everyone is worried I think that they could be bothering people during the workday with a rather high-priority notification.

Instagram is better, like you say, because we can absorb the links and gifs passively.

thaumasiotes |root |parent |previous [-]

Features of Old Facebook:

- It's a photo album. Anyone who can view your page can see your photos.

- You can also post status updates.

- It publishes a list of your friends. Anyone is free to check that out.

- Your friends can write on your wall, where anyone can see what they wrote.

- It publishes your biographical data: where you go (or went) to school, where you work, whether you're single, and if not what kind of relationship you're in.

- You belong to a number of "groups". The groups don't organize activities or act as chat channels; their purpose is that your page displays a list of the names of the groups to which you belong, and that list is an expression of your personality and/or ideological commitments.

Which of those do WhatsApp groups do?

Izkata |root |parent |next [-]

"Groups" is New Facebook, the replacement for the Network pages.

Used to be there was a whole section of the site meant for connecting with people at the same college/university as you, that you were automatically included in based on your email domain. It had a calendar and events and was geared towards real-world interaction.

thaumasiotes |root |parent [-]

> "Groups" is New Facebook, the replacement for the Network pages.

"Groups" is 2004. Their domain was still "thefacebook.com".

Izkata |root |parent [-]

You're thinking of something else, Groups didn't exist until 2010 (though I thought it was a bit earlier, like 2008 - I thought they came out about the same time the Network pages went away, while I was still in college): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/oct/07/facebook-...

I do remember Friend Lists were much earlier though.

thaumasiotes |root |parent [-]

> You're thinking of something else, Groups didn't exist until 2010

No, I'm not thinking of something else. You are assuming that when I say "groups", I'm thinking of the feature called "Facebook Groups" in your link, which is a stupid thing for you to assume.

Here's a preserved screenshot of a 2005 page: https://www.shareaholic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/...

See the link in the left-hand sidebar saying "My Groups"?

butler14 |root |parent |previous [-]

All the bits that matter, I guess

thaumasiotes |root |parent [-]

Which are...?

throwway120385 |next |previous [-]

Is your pricing enough for the service to make money without requiring VC funding? And are you going to be able to maintain business focus on your core use cases throughout the next 5-10 years? I think it's a tough sell for me and my friends to use something like old Facebook when we know the rest of that story.

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

I think so, the feed doesn't really cost much and our infra isn't on AWS. The main focus is the photo storage and as long as that makes enough to cover costs long-term I'm happy keeping it the way it is. There isn't really a point trying to compete with modern Facebook.

mattbrewsbytes |next |previous [-]

I think there's merit in a privacy first, no ads, no global/viral content app/service like this; there have been a lot of threads here on HN with related sentiment. I think the challenge is more a business problem - how do you pull users in when people may be scattered across various platforms? Are you finding that a single user purchasing a $2/mo plan pulls in additional users?

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

The business side of things might become a challenge, I have some ideas on how to overcome this without affecting the core product, but its definitely going to be a lot of experimentation. As for the scattered users, because its private its useful as a way of directly sending interesting things from other platforms to someone you know, rather than competing with those platforms. As long as there's one other person you know, its closer to a messaging service for links/posts than a traditional social network

baetylus |next |previous [-]

I think this is cool! Maybe not your focus, but is there a place for using AI to help figure out who to send photos to / which pockets to send to?

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

Thanks! :) There could be, talking to users they would definitely like some 'magic button' that automatically organizes the photos into albums by date/location and auto-adds them to pockets. We've been trying to work on a local, opt-in solution on iOS but its definitely not an easy problem to solve, so on the back-burner for now.

smokedetector1 |next |previous [-]

Not trying to be a hater, but I'm not sure if I would download an app just for this, and I'm almost 100% sure my non-tech friends and family wouldn't.

Is there a way to make this an add-on to another product that people are already on? Or a site that pulls data from another product?

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

Which part? The photos or the feed?

mrhottakes |next |previous [-]

Old Facebook worked out great, so this should be a positive force for good as well.

drcongo |next |previous [-]

> You don’t really remember the exact month something happened, but you always remember who was there.

This is such a weird premise, I can already search photos by people on my phone or Mac, but that also lets me find photos without people in.

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

Sure, but it doesn't always work and isn't very organized. My point is that you already organized all of those photos every time you shared them. So why not capitalize on it for future photos without additional effort?

The other thing is that it isn't straightforward to pass on existing photos to children. I inherited boxes of photo albums and VHS tapes from my childhood, but it's a lot more complicated to share a whole bunch of memories with future generations; adding a placeholder to a bunch of albums that someone else can inherit later just makes more sense to me.

nancyminusone |next |previous [-]

>screenshot with Minon profile pic

My god, they really did recreate Facebook

Ancalagon |next |previous [-]

I dunno how to tell you this but I think it looks and functions like facebook because the model you vibe coded with was probably trained on old facebook

snthpy |next |previous [-]

OT but anyone remember Diaspora? Which was supposed to be an open (source? Idr) FB. Never heard of it again after the manifesto post.

rambambram |next |previous [-]

What about RSS and feed readers? Where you also can read posts from the domains you think you know.

bobtheowl2 |next |previous [-]

Was does the 'inherited' toggle on the main screen imply?

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

Its for the photos, in a nutshell the 'chat' will inherit/show you albums from everywhere that the user/group is a subset. For example, if you have a family group with a bunch of family photos, and you open the 'chat' with a sibling, you'll also see the family photos since the sibling is a subset of the family, unless you toggle inherited off, in that case it'll only show you albums with you and your sibling exclusively. Just a filtering mechanism for convenience

LightBug1 |next |previous [-]

Drop the "Pic". Just "Pocket". It's cleaner.

mikez302 |root |parent [-]

I kind of like "PicPocket". "Pocket" is too easily confused with Mozilla Pocket IMO.

hawaiianbrah |root |parent [-]

Mozilla Pocket is defunct now, so not necessarily a big problem. Maybe it’s a way to leverage a somewhat known name…

dudu24 |next |previous [-]

[flagged]

amr_shawky |root |parent [-]

Ouch, I wrote this myself, but I am new to blogging so point taken.

chickensong |root |parent |next [-]

It's fine, that's very reasonable language. Just ignore the AI writing detectives. We're in a world now where there will always be one, and their comments are typically low effort and without value. Good job on making something.

deltaknight |root |parent |previous [-]

Honestly I wouldn’t take that too seriously, I think the whole triplet “not A, not B, not C” has been extremely common when talking about problems people are passionate about, and it’s a shame that crappy AI prose has trained people to treat it as a marker of AI. But it’s a exactly because that was effective in popular texts that AI has picked it up.

As long as the post isn’t this repeated 15 times like an AI would, just write how you want to write and most people will like it just fine. It’s a shame that we have to tone ourselves down nowadays.

0xbadcafebee |previous [-]

> old FB was immensely popular

So were heroin and cocaine, which were sold commercially for 25 and 40 years, respectively