[robotsquidward]

Path has been used by my girlfriends family for the past six years as their familial social network. They all just follow each other and because they don't use it for anything else it's a perfect little community for sharing memories. It was hard for them to cope with the fact that it's all getting shut down after six years using it.

Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work. I guess the value isn't there to build it because it can't sprawl in the same way as other social networks.

[oihoaihsfoiahsf]

Our family just uses a Google Photos album where we put pictures of ourselves and our son. We send the link to people who might be interested, and then they get notifications when we put in more pictures. The rest of our family often posts things to their own albums and we get notifications of that. And anybody can comment on any of the pictures. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good experience. I can only imagine it would be even better if there were a single album shared by the whole extended family.

[detaro]

Ad-based, VC funded needs sprawl and people spending time looking at the app/site (and thus ads, too).

Paid can avoid that, but of course has it a lot harder to get people to sign up, so those options tend to grow very slowly, often too slowly.

[astura]

>Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work.

Probably because Facebook Groups covers this use case pretty well and everyone already has a Facebook account. That's my guess.

[GuiA]

Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work.

Because they are run by for profit companies, operating in a capitalistic framework.

That is one of the core pillars of free software as envisioned by Stallman - software that can truly serve the needs of the people, because it is not subject to those pressures.

A world where your girlfriend’s family could painlessly deploy their own such service for just a few users and not have to worry about a company shutting it down whenever they feel like it would be wonderful.

[pikzel]

Yeah, I'm sure they would be able to deploy the service, have it secure and updated, having apps up to date on their new devices. Or maybe that takes time and effort, and people need to pay their bills.

[hrktb]

I think for people don’t mind paying for things they actualy own.

For instance grand-parents don’t want to pay for instagram but will pay premium to have great pictures printed and framed.

Or pay to have their own domain name.

People pay for Dropbox or Squarespace.

I’d totally see my parents paying for a Synology if someone could install it and maintain it for around 10$/€ a month. Currently they pay for one time install fees + maintenance hours for their windows machine for instance, it’s not a big stretch.

[TarpitCarnivore]

Synology is heavily business focused, but I do feel they're making steps towards competing with the bigger companies by offering smaller scale options. They now have Chat, Drive, and Moments which all do things like Slack, GDrive, and Timehop and with apps. Obviously the main caveat is they're not as refined/full featured.

[eberfreitas]

It takes much more time, effort and labor to secure high profit margins...

[fauigerzigerk]

The profit margins need to be high enough to justify investing in the product before you know whether anyone will ever want to buy it.

The margins of successful products also need to fund all the failed attempts at making stuff that ultimately no one wants.

I think innovation without speculation is impossible and speculation has a cost.