[newfeatureok]

Literally everything on the home page is already possible with Facebook. Why use this?

Also, without any explicit monetization alternative other than advertising displayed, there's really no guarantee that this won't just devolve into the same thing as Twitter and Facebook.

EDIT: Also, upon looking at the other people who commented on this, other than myself and one other person everyone has fewer than 10 comments total.

[yurylifshits]

Thanks! Openland is almost intentionally very close to FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram in its user experience. We want to make it super familiar and easy to participate for everyday people who join for access to special communities and people we have on the platform.

Today, our biggest and most distinct advantages are on the organizer side. Automation and integrations are key for larger organizations and individual leaders to launch and operate their communities. With Openland there will be more communities in the world.

[bradknowles]

This tells me that you’re going to have a huge discoverability problem. People won’t know which group chats to join, unless they are explicitly invited. If you’re going to replace FB Messenger, then you have to have an established community that is the size of FB. Or you have to have a really strong network effect that will rapidly build the size of your community to that range.

Things that I hate about Discord are that it forces me to have just one global account name across all servers, and one icon. Sure, once I join a server, I can change my nickname there, but I still can’t change my icon. But names (and nicknames) aren’t globally appropriate or useful. Nor are icons.

But at least Discord servers have public forums, some of which might be announce-only, others might be discussion oriented, and then there might be private forums that are only available to certain people with a particular tag. It doesn’t sound like your service is going to have any of this.