We accidentally recreated old Facebook

aamr_shawky 2 days ago 23 commentsRead Article on amrshawky.com

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

brenschluss•about 2 hours ago

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.

amr_shawky•about 2 hours ago

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.

tim-projects•about 1 hour ago

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

amr_shawky•about 1 hour ago

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.

thaumasiotes•about 1 hour ago

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•23 minutes ago

"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.

butler14•25 minutes ago

All the bits that matter, I guess

throwway120385•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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.

baetylus•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

nancyminusone•about 2 hours ago

>screenshot with Minon profile pic

My god, they really did recreate Facebook

mrhottakes•about 2 hours ago

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

rambambram•about 1 hour ago

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

smokedetector1•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

Which part? The photos or the feed?

drcongo•about 3 hours ago

> 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•about 2 hours ago

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.

LightBug1•about 1 hour ago

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

dudu24•about 2 hours ago

"we realized that this feels a lot like old FB - no ads, no ‘discover’, no algorithms. Just posts from people you know."

holy chatgpt

amr_shawky•about 2 hours ago

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

chickensong•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.