We started Slyde not long ago and had a ShowHN about a month ago, and we've been growing steadily since. It's not perfect, but we're gaining steam and people seem to like it.
Ultimately solving the problem we knew existed, however hard it was, ended up being the right answer so far. It's just a start but it's exciting and we wanted to share this milestone with everybody.
But seriously, just joking, I wish you the best of luck! I hope each of these 1000 will bring others and it should go quickly.
I won't join though. For me social media networks are 'been there and done that'. I haven't missed Facebook at all since I left it. After a while it really felt like work to drag myself through that timeline with all those people posting the same tired memes over and over or discussing what they had for lunch. I backed openbook (now okuna) on kickstarter but never really had a reason to come back to it.
I just use LinkedIn now because you can't really do without it (and it's not really social media, more like hyper curated personal PR). And some special-purpose platforms like some work-related public slack circles and Yammer at work.
That's true, I have been put off by Facebook more than I should have. Thinking of what I just wrote above, I do realise that things like Yammer do provide a tangible benefit. Those slack groups even more so. In fact the communication with peers in other businesses is highly valuable and the informality (compared to e.g. LinkedIn) really adds to the information flow.
I think for me where facebook went wrong was when they stopped showing a list of posts of my friends (the 'feed' I think they called it), and started with the 'timeline'. Which meant hiding some posts from my friends and adding other stuff their algorithms thought I would be interested in. Unfortunately they were mostly wrong.
I view social media in terms of pearls:crap ratio. If I find something that makes me smile or really enlightens me, it's a pearl. Everything else I just have to drag through is crap.
Twitter for me has always had a really low ratio. The short messages promote hollow nothingness like what you had for dinner and discourage insightful information. Facebook used to be pretty good at this, until the timeline. This dropped the ratio like a brick and made it all a chore. What got me to leave was the Cambridge Analytica stuff but to be honest the real damage was done long before that.
So yes maybe I will give it another shot :) Sorry if I came across as harsh (not about Slyde but social media in general), but you do have a very good point with facebook having soiled the general reputation of social media. Sadly enough this makes it even harder for you!
This is a blog that explains in detail what our monetization strategy is.
Long story short though, we plan on non-targeted ads in the future. Slyde is also pro creator / influencer, and we have incorporated a way for a premium option that is ad-free and gives users a way to support communities on Slyde. We haven't pushed premium yet, we're still trying to grow. But we have a plan.
I think one thing you should really watch out for is information harvesting from third-parties as well.
I think this will be an issue with the Fediverse as well if it gets big. The protocol itself is so open it is hard to control who views your posts IMO. So instead of having sanctioned links to third parties like Facebook has, they can just siphon off data themselves. But for a centralised platform like yours this will be easier to prevent. Might mean you have to force a login though even to view. Edit: I see you already do that, good!
Ultimately solving the problem we knew existed, however hard it was, ended up being the right answer so far. It's just a start but it's exciting and we wanted to share this milestone with everybody.
You can see our original ShowHN post here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25267854