Daft Social: Anti-social social network for minimalists

I was just wondering if Daft Social was going to sustain itself through user monetization (sales, ads, donations, etc), it's totally cool if its based on some other mechanism. Just curious.

vhodges• 2 years ago

There's a store selling swag (A hat and a floppy with the source to the site - coming soon!?)

wt__2• 2 years ago

How about each time you post it replies with an advertisement? (although that would just increase costs...)

meowtimemania2• 2 years ago

how do you subscribe to posts?

jovial_cavalier• 2 years ago

It seems like you're supposed to use the RSS feature.

BadHumans2• 2 years ago

I really like this idea and hope it somewhat catches on.

imwillofficial• 2 years ago

I’m kinda feeling it

2stya• 2 years ago

That's so plain, it's actually genius

_old_dude_• 2 years ago

Hello, I do not know if someone from Daft is reading this thread, but you should not use contiguous ids

https://daftsocial.com/daftsocial/?id=201

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

Doesn't that just help with discovery? That doesn't seem like a bad practice here.

0x457• 2 years ago

Discovering random threads to spam in doesn't help with discovery for users.

bink2• 2 years ago

I'm sure they're not really overly concerned about security, but email addresses get logged everywhere on the Internet. Accounts would be pretty easy to hijack. Maybe that makes it more fun though.

itake3• 2 years ago

I personally love low-security social networks. I consider HN to qualify (as you just need a username and password, no email verification).

Small social networks can get away with it b/c they aren't big enough targets for abusers.

pants2• 2 years ago

Account security is a bigger concern for the network than it is for the user. If someone steals my HN account, I won't really care (it's around my 5th account anyway). But if the hacker uses my account's reputation to evade spam filters, that becomes an issue for HN.

al_borland• 2 years ago

Not exactly social media, but when Instapaper came out they only used usernames, no password. I think the idea was that no one would care enough to delete your read it later list, and it wasn’t big enough to draw much attention. I remember it being like this for quite a long time.

paulddraper• 2 years ago

Your comment makes me wonder...what is HN's spam volume?

I never see any.

antisthenes• 2 years ago

HN audience is much more likely to use complex passwords, that are not reused elsewhere.

So the overall security level is probably still higher than elsewhere with 2FA, etc.

nsagent2• 2 years ago

I don't think they take security any less seriously than most social networks. If you're worried the sending/receiving servers have access to the email address, then it seems you would have to be equally concerned account recovery via email considering most email is not encrypted.

bink2• 2 years ago

The target email address basically includes a secret that allows you to post by sending an email to it. It's not the same thing as clicking on an email you receive to reset a password. I can't reset your password just by knowing the email address associated with your Facebook account. I'd have to intercept the password reset email.

rakoo• 2 years ago

Maybe a publishing address is locked to a sender address after the first post, so you'd need to also hijack the sender account

evbogue• 2 years ago

I was able to create an account.

Does Daft have a feed where you can see who else is posting?

AdamH12113• 2 years ago

I doubt this will go anywhere, but I still enjoyed reading it. The really clever part for me is the way it uses email to do most of the work. In particular:

Q: What if I lose my secret Daft Social email address?
A: If you already sent posts, you should find it in the sent emails folder.

Brilliant.

quickthrower2• 2 years ago

Sort of a cut down mailing lists

jll29• 2 years ago

In the past, Posterous was a blogging service that was powered by email, and I loved it. (You could blog using the email body and attached photos were also posted, so Daft Social without the "minimalist" part.)

Sadly, it was acquired by Twitter and then shut down.

I like that relying on the standard email protocols means you don't need an extra client to post. I wish more services could be powered by email - it is already so old, yet still underestiated as a protocol.

PS 1: Now someone just needs to give me back my BlackBerry...

PS 2: It's great they also support another standard, RSS. Two features that I would like to see are: (a) subscribe to these RSS feeds as email (for symmetry, so I can read all in my email client if I want to) and (b) two-way interoperability with Mastodon.

PS 3: I can see others have pointed out their liking of Posterious below already, so this feature should have a future in some form or another!

joeross• 2 years ago

The Posterous founders started Posthaven after Posterous shut down, and Posthaven – by all appearances essentially a Posterous clone – is still going (and promises at least for now to stay that way): https://www.posthaven.com/features

One of those cofounders is probably familiar to YC nerds: https://blog.garrytan.com/about-me

kevincox5• 2 years ago

I think it would be extra-clever to generate a contact card for the user after sign up. Then they can just import it into their address book.

...of course this relies on the user having vCard set up to open with the address book that they actually use. And it is surprising how broken most user's setups are.

hammyhavoc• 2 years ago

Why not mailing lists at this point?

geraldhh• 2 years ago

hard to monetize

Simulacra2• 2 years ago

It looks like Usenet

gnufx• 2 years ago

Rather different (less daft?), but also working via email: https://delta.chat/

andrefuchs• 2 years ago

Posterous introduced this 'Post by Email' concept. Really loved the simplicity of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous

arbuge• 2 years ago

I tried something along those lines a few years ago… https://publicemails.com

throwawaaarrgh• 2 years ago

I'm sure others allowed posting by email before. BrightKite was a fantastic social network that was location-based, and you could post via email. My friends and I still miss it... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightkite

gala8y• 2 years ago

Wordpress had/has this capability, too.

r0s• 2 years ago

I absolutely loved Posterous, major shame it was squashed after being bought(?).

starkparker• 2 years ago

Oh man, the nostalgia I just had. I used a Peek to post to Posterous.

dochne• 2 years ago

MSN Spaces had this feature back in 2006! Makes me feel nostalgic!

Simulacra2• 2 years ago

Seems like Usenet ..

taude• 2 years ago

I came here to say that I think both Posterous and Tumblr used to have this same feature. Well, it was just one of the multiple ways of publishing content back then, as opposed to being the way for this minimalist one....

Looks like Tumblr removed it [1]

Links to some Posterous articles about the feature [2]

[1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16420/post-to-tu...

[2] https://www.guidingtech.com/1525/how-to-use-posterous-quickl...

What's old is new again.

Posterous was peak blogging and content sharing for me, btw.

leeeeeepw• 2 years ago

Couldn't sign up but like the concept

seanosaur• 2 years ago

Q: How do I post links or images?
A: Write or copy a link to a website or an image into the email subject line and send it to your secret Daft Social email address.

I'm not sure I fully agree with the "simplification and reduction" premise if the only way I can get an image onto Daft Social is if I host it elsewhere first.

So if I'm reading this right, I would snap a photo on my phone, host the image somewhere, then send the URL to that image in an email. That doesn't sound overly simple.

mdorazio• 2 years ago

Seems like you could upload to Dropbox and use a shareable link from your phone, no?

bemusedthrow75• 2 years ago

Q: How can I delete my Daft Social account? A: Write or copy #deletedaftsocial into the email subject line > and send it to your secret Daft Social email address. Your account will be permanently deleted immediately. Please note: deleted accounts cannot be restored.

Yep. That sounds robust. Ship it!

dt3ft2• 2 years ago

Bulletproof! What could possibly go wrong with this concept?

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Shouldn't an “Anti-Social” social network, however minimal, be NO Social Networks?

extragood• 2 years ago

Even more extreme.

'Antisocial' means against others. "Antagonistic, hostile, or unfriendly toward others; menacing"

'Asocial' means reclusive or unwilling to be social, but isn't necessarily antagonistic

chaosmonger7• 2 years ago

This is the problem for sure.

I hate social media and I am someone who this site is directed at. What I like about HN is the interaction but no "followers". Of course, people want their thoughts to not be disliked but it is not a childish, high school popularity contest that if you get popular enough, you get paid for being popular.

A network without nodes and edges isn't a network.

Myspace also didn't brand itself as "super internet forum" or something like that. If you really do something different to interest people who hate social media, it will need to have no resemblance to social media.

Phenomenit• 2 years ago

So is there just the one feed? I mean how do you browse what’s posted? You need to know exactly which account you want to follow?

bhaney• 2 years ago

I love the technical aesthetic of this, but is there a "network" part of it at all? If not, I think I'd rather just self-host something similar and get the same experience without the risk of the service holding all my posts dying or trying to invasively monetize later.

Towaway69• 2 years ago

Reminds me of telegra.ph which requires no email, no login and not much else (even content is optional).

[0] https://telegra.ph/

camgunz2• 2 years ago

Super cool. Reading the subject-line-only requirement, I love it, but the nerd in me is like, "just only accept the text/plain MIME-type!". But, yeah either way very cool B)

kevincox5• 2 years ago

The problem with this is that email has no negotiation. So you then need to teach users how to configure their email client to compose in plain text. Otherwise users will be confused when their message renders differently after sending and from how it appears in their outbox. (IIUC most clients will generate a text/plain message, but this isn't very visible to users).

By using the subject line the composer is already forced into plain text and so the user will get a more accurate "preview" of how the final post will look.

camgunz2• 2 years ago

Yeah I mean I remember some article from long ago where it was explaining how hard it is to actually get most MUAs to not send text/html. I think they all send both because only sending one or the other gets you marked as spam.

The problem with this is that email has no negotiation.

Well, you can bounce stuff. But, yeah I agree it's the correct product decision to not wander down the MUA rabbit hole. Like I said it's just the (email) nerd in me can't let it go haha.

MontgomeryPi22• 2 years ago

I could see this being useful for a community-based website where it could be embedded into a page on the site (like an iframe), so many 'admins' could provide updates.

kevincox5• 2 years ago

It seems that you could do this via their RSS feeds. There lots of RSS "widgets" that can be embedded onto your page.

MontgomeryPi22• 2 years ago

Nice idea, tks

kevincox5• 2 years ago

Q: Does Daft Social support RSS?
A: Yes, just add an username to https://daftsocial.com/rss?feed= to get the RSS feed.

This could really benefit from auto-discovery. Asking users to find the FAQ then construct a URL is not a very effective measure.

The auto-discovery TL;DR is if you put a link tag like the following onto a user's pages then you can subscribe to the feed just by putting any of their articles into your feed reader. This may also help SEO as Google and other search engines will discover and watch the feed.

    <link rel=alternate title="{username}" type=application/atom+xml href="/rss/?feed={username}">

I wrote a bit more detail about auto-discovery here: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#disc...

nsagent2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure that this is intentional. The site's called Daft Social for a reason. There isn't even a link back to the homepage from a given user page and there's no way to find users unless they post their profile link somewhere. Maybe that philosophy will change, but personally I really like just how brutally minimalist the site is. The site was created by Pascal Deville, who's also behind https://brutalistwebsites.com/

corruptnetwork2• 2 years ago

Great, just implemented auto discovery links into the userpages. Go check out: e.g. https://daftsocial.com/daftsocial/

kevincox5• 2 years ago

Nice, works perfectly. If I put that URL into my reader it now finds the feed automatically.

scooke• 2 years ago

I would like a self-hosted version! Does it exist?

lencastre• 2 years ago

I think the service got hugged by HN

wt__2• 2 years ago

A lot of people are focusing on the feeds etc, but I think the genius of this is that no-one can start a conversation with anybody else.

ppetty• 2 years ago

In terms of publishing by email … HEY by 37 Signals has a feature where each user has world.hey.com/username blogs based on emails from username@hey.com sent to world@hey.com … very easy low friction publishing. This has subscriptions & RSS built in and you can import subscribers.

Details: https://www.hey.com/world/

For example: https://world.hey.com/jason

Daft Social: Anti-social social network for minimalists

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