How to run a small social network site for your friends
▻https://runyourown.social
The main reason to run a small social network site is that you can create an online environment tailored to the needs of your community in a way that a big corporation like Facebook or Twitter never could. Yes, you can always start a Facebook Group for your community and moderate that how you like, but only within certain bounds set by Facebook. If you (or your community) run the whole site, then you are ultimately the boss of what goes on. It is harder work than letting Facebook or Twitter or Slack or Basecamp or whoever else take care of everything, but I believe it’s worth it.
Let’s go back to Friend Camp. While there are a hundred thousand people we can talk to from Friend Camp, there are only about 50 people with an active Friend Camp login. We call ourselves “campers” because we are corny like that. And campers have a special communication channel that lets us post messages that only other campers can see.
If I make software that makes the lives of 50 people much nicer, and it makes 0 people more miserable, then on the balance I think I’m doing better than a lot of programmers in the world.
Because we’re mostly all friends with each other, this extra communications mode is kind of like a group chat on steroids. For our community it ends up being a sort of hybrid between Twitter and a group chat. As a result of having a community layer alongside a more public layer, we have a movie night, a book club, and a postcard club. Campers visit each other when we travel, even if we’ve never met in person before. We correspond with each other about what we’re making for dinner and trade recipes. They’re the kind of mundane interactions that you probably don’t want to have with perfect strangers but you cherish in a group of people you care about.
We are also able to have moderation rules that are hyper-specific to our own values as a community. It lets us maintain an environment that’s far more pleasant than you find on most social media sites.