Show HN: A social network that lets you own your data

[nikhildahake]

I created Timelines so that people could have ownership over their data while posting on social media. Timelines stores your data in a specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other data on Google drive.

Do try it out. Hoping to get some useful feedback. Thanks!

Product: https://www.timelines.co

My public timeline: https://www.timelines.co/nikhildahake

[JakeAl]

Great idea, but I wouldn't trust Google. How about using a DAT protocol service and just making it secure P2P? That's all I want. Get rid of all these censoring spying online services and let the people talk to each other and give permission only to those they want without anyone playing thought police/stasi.

[nikhildahake]

@JakeAl -- For P2P to work, both the peers will have to be online to serve the stored files. Say there are 2 computers on the network A and B. If A is accessing the files on B and B goes down, A will not be able to access photos of B.

So, P2P for social networking won't work. For it to really work, a lot of nodes on the network will have to be online and the data will have to be stored on multiple nodes for the purpose redundancy. Imagine your photos being stored all over the web on someone's personal computer!

[bruceb]

The problem would be most of the general public doesn't care. As such won't spend the time to put in info.

Narrow the focus to a certain group maybe?

Also no where on this page does it tell me how my data stays private. Why should people trust this site?

[nikhildahake]

Hmmm -- is the wording not enough -- that the data is going to stay on google drive?

Do you have any suggestions on how this should be put forth to the user?

[bruceb]

There was nothing that said what exactly happens with the data.

Users also don’t know who you are. Why should I trust you?

[nikhildahake]

Okay, thanks. Let me see how I can fix this.