The legal terms seem pretty evil for what this is. I'll allow that evil may not be the intent. Perhaps you just asked a lawyer for the most bulletproof terms possible, but what you've end up with is a very one sided set of terms. Honestly the more I read, the weirder they get. If I tell a lie to another user, them I'm liable to be banned? I see what you are going for in that section, but as written, any normal, day to day, social lubricant style lie/falsehood could get you banned? On a social network?
Edit: reading further, I suspect these were just taken from somewhere unless in 2025 they've got some Flash code to protect:
>Copy or adapt the Services' software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.
This was the model YikYak used and it was so much fun. They very much promoted it for use at colleges for students, but ended up geofence blocking it around high schools/middle schools because of cyberbulling concerns.
But, if enough people used it around certain areas, it could be a lot of fun & very helpful just to chit chat & talk about the weather & etc.
EDIT I can't accept the terms on my Samsung phone, as the text is over top of the buttons and I can't do anything but scroll the terms. Not sure if this is a browser (Brave) problem or a font size or what.
I've been looking for something like this for a while![1]
How do you deal with spam?
For example, Telegram has a "people near me" option which is full of drugs and sex-workers. Great if you like that sort of thing, but not exactly welcoming if you just want to chat to other people in the park / conference / stadium etc.
Back in the day when Direct Connect[1] was a thing, and we all had insane speeds in the metropolitan area (but not so great outside of that), I used to run a DC hub. Which due to said speeds had mostly people that were close by, geographically speaking, and the interactions felt so much more relevant, probably because of the "third thing" you mention, the common interest/background.
So I've also been thinking for a while now: how can that style of community be recreated? There's of course the chicken-and-egg problem until you have traction, but also things like: how big should the community be, geographically? The same size in the US vs EU likely encompasses quite different amounts of people. Should it be anonymous or real identities? Should history be viewable by new members or should it be ephemeral? And so on.
Anyway, interesting prototype, I hope you get some traction!
The solution here is human moderation and accepting that it's not going to turn into a unicorn, but a sustainable medium-sized business is incredibly possible. There are existing examples of this.
Which examples? I can’t think of any profitable companies with a profile like that. Free social media sites basically require scale.
Human moderation is going to be a huge hurdle for this. Connecting Internet users by location seems like a massive safety liability.
Making sure users are human and not just gathering locations of uses at an individual non-aggregated level also seems like a horrendous bad time.
On top of that, anonymous mode is going to be removed in the future, so you literally just have to tell other users your seemingly somewhat precise location, tied to your real persona.
Who wants this?
It’s also crazy that this site asks for location before even telling us what it is. On mobile it’s especially bad because the site isn’t even loaded or visible before the OS prompt covers basically the whole screen.
The service does need your location on the marketing page, collect that when users actually start using it.
[1]: Been around for 25 years, apparently employees 20 people and is still popular to this day. Donation-based.
[2] Seven paid staff members, $5 for an account, been around at least 22 years.
And there are bound to be a dozen outside the US that I don't know of. I've heard of this [3] being a Dutch one that had a good run for decades with multiple full-time employees, but can't confirm as I don't speak Dutch. Supposedly ad and donation sustained (?). Again, has outlived most social networks. Maybe a Dutch HNer who reads this can tell us more.
You can mean a thousand things by "profitable" but both achieve what I posited and what most commonly underlies "profitable": sustainable. And they are. They're easily in the top 1% of social networks by longevity. That the former is non-profit doesn't make a material difference, these are effectively medium-sized businesses as I posited.
This is really great, the only problem for me is that there is nobody around me! I can see it working way better for stuff like universities though.
I wonder if there could be a variant for Drop which is world wide - imagine being able to join a chat in a foreign country (hopefully you speak the language!) and chat with the locals. I imagine moderation would be a big pain but I could see it being fun and sort of in the spirit of the old web.
On chrome iOS I’m physically unable to press the three checkboxes on the terms which means I can’t try your app. They appear to be overlapped by the terms themselves and thus never received click events.
You’re looking to replicate a college campus experience but for the general public. That’s your first yellow flag so to speak.
The problem is that adults don’t live on college campuses and don’t really have the same socialization patterns. They’re not in a “safe” bubble where everyone they encounter has the commonality of attending the same admission-required school, where they have a baseline level of trust for random people like a college student has for the other people in their bubble. College students can get physically kicked off of campus for doing things against school policy that aren’t even at the level of being illegal. In real life I can be living next to a convicted sex offender and there’s nothing I can do about it besides move.
Your competitor is Facebook Groups, which is an absolute elephant in the space.
Your implementation so far feels creepy. You’re asking for location immediately on the marketing page (why?).
The marketing page seems to indicate that users are just going to disclose their exact current location and not be anonymous after the beta. The screenshots look like I’m going to reveal my location to strangers as a dot on a map. I don’t know if you’re really disclosing your users’ exact locations to each other or if they’re made more generalized but that seems like an immediate no thanks for just about anyone with any reasonable sense of threat evaluation.
I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, but your founder profile seems to be “two nerdy male college students.”
Can I ask you: do you think women would want to disclose their semi-precise location to strangers on the Internet? What’s the male to female ratio on this campus discord server you’re looking to capture the vibe from?
You also say this experience is trying to replicate the close community you have on discord. Why am I not just using discord? Spoiler alert: I’m already using discord with local people in my area.
Amazing portfolio project, I’m just not vibing with it as a business idea.
The legal terms seem pretty evil for what this is. I'll allow that evil may not be the intent. Perhaps you just asked a lawyer for the most bulletproof terms possible, but what you've end up with is a very one sided set of terms. Honestly the more I read, the weirder they get. If I tell a lie to another user, them I'm liable to be banned? I see what you are going for in that section, but as written, any normal, day to day, social lubricant style lie/falsehood could get you banned? On a social network?
Edit: reading further, I suspect these were just taken from somewhere unless in 2025 they've got some Flash code to protect:
>Copy or adapt the Services' software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.
It is evil to not allow lies?
That does not seem to be so evil .. but I did not found the legal terms on a first glance, so maybe there is more?
This was the model YikYak used and it was so much fun. They very much promoted it for use at colleges for students, but ended up geofence blocking it around high schools/middle schools because of cyberbulling concerns.
But, if enough people used it around certain areas, it could be a lot of fun & very helpful just to chit chat & talk about the weather & etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak
EDIT I can't accept the terms on my Samsung phone, as the text is over top of the buttons and I can't do anything but scroll the terms. Not sure if this is a browser (Brave) problem or a font size or what.
https://imgur.com/a/LjFFLn5
This happened to me too - the solution is to temporarily set the page view as desktop view through the browser settings.
I've been looking for something like this for a while![1]
How do you deal with spam?
For example, Telegram has a "people near me" option which is full of drugs and sex-workers. Great if you like that sort of thing, but not exactly welcoming if you just want to chat to other people in the park / conference / stadium etc.
[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/why-is-it-so-hard-to-chat-t...
Back in the day when Direct Connect[1] was a thing, and we all had insane speeds in the metropolitan area (but not so great outside of that), I used to run a DC hub. Which due to said speeds had mostly people that were close by, geographically speaking, and the interactions felt so much more relevant, probably because of the "third thing" you mention, the common interest/background.
So I've also been thinking for a while now: how can that style of community be recreated? There's of course the chicken-and-egg problem until you have traction, but also things like: how big should the community be, geographically? The same size in the US vs EU likely encompasses quite different amounts of people. Should it be anonymous or real identities? Should history be viewable by new members or should it be ephemeral? And so on.
Anyway, interesting prototype, I hope you get some traction!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)
The concept reminds me of YikYak which amassed a large user base and was successful. But you should also take a look at why YikYak failed in the end.
The solution here is human moderation and accepting that it's not going to turn into a unicorn, but a sustainable medium-sized business is incredibly possible. There are existing examples of this.
Not AI moderation? I'd assume the more scalable option is having an LLM parse messages when reported.
Which examples? I can’t think of any profitable companies with a profile like that. Free social media sites basically require scale.
Human moderation is going to be a huge hurdle for this. Connecting Internet users by location seems like a massive safety liability.
Making sure users are human and not just gathering locations of uses at an individual non-aggregated level also seems like a horrendous bad time.
On top of that, anonymous mode is going to be removed in the future, so you literally just have to tell other users your seemingly somewhat precise location, tied to your real persona.
Who wants this?
It’s also crazy that this site asks for location before even telling us what it is. On mobile it’s especially bad because the site isn’t even loaded or visible before the OS prompt covers basically the whole screen.
The service does need your location on the marketing page, collect that when users actually start using it.
[1]: Been around for 25 years, apparently employees 20 people and is still popular to this day. Donation-based.
[2] Seven paid staff members, $5 for an account, been around at least 22 years.
And there are bound to be a dozen outside the US that I don't know of. I've heard of this [3] being a Dutch one that had a good run for decades with multiple full-time employees, but can't confirm as I don't speak Dutch. Supposedly ad and donation sustained (?). Again, has outlived most social networks. Maybe a Dutch HNer who reads this can tell us more.
You can mean a thousand things by "profitable" but both achieve what I posited and what most commonly underlies "profitable": sustainable. And they are. They're easily in the top 1% of social networks by longevity. That the former is non-profit doesn't make a material difference, these are effectively medium-sized businesses as I posited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Porch_Forum
[2] https://www.metafilter.com
[3] https://www.fok.nl
This is really great, the only problem for me is that there is nobody around me! I can see it working way better for stuff like universities though.
I wonder if there could be a variant for Drop which is world wide - imagine being able to join a chat in a foreign country (hopefully you speak the language!) and chat with the locals. I imagine moderation would be a big pain but I could see it being fun and sort of in the spirit of the old web.
On chrome iOS I’m physically unable to press the three checkboxes on the terms which means I can’t try your app. They appear to be overlapped by the terms themselves and thus never received click events.
Yeah, this only appears to work on desktops with a res of 4K or greater, which is… not ideal for a social network?
iOS safari same issue. can’t get passed the terms
This is super cool, and exactly what I’d want! Although I just tried creating a Drop (twice) and it didn’t seem to work.
After failing to create a hub (too large in my cade) the state of hub selection isn't reset (you need to cancel manually before retrying)
I am not expert, but we should definitely have a SSH based chat experience in 2025. Everything is moving to terminal, this should too!
Cool! On Chrome Desktop, I'm unable to sign up due to not being able to click the top T&C checkbox (overlapping content).
I can't accept the ToS on mobile
Same here on desktop
Same here (MacBook Air). I assume the developer uses a large screen.
I could on Firefox mobile
The whole thing is a bad idea.
You’re looking to replicate a college campus experience but for the general public. That’s your first yellow flag so to speak.
The problem is that adults don’t live on college campuses and don’t really have the same socialization patterns. They’re not in a “safe” bubble where everyone they encounter has the commonality of attending the same admission-required school, where they have a baseline level of trust for random people like a college student has for the other people in their bubble. College students can get physically kicked off of campus for doing things against school policy that aren’t even at the level of being illegal. In real life I can be living next to a convicted sex offender and there’s nothing I can do about it besides move.
Your competitor is Facebook Groups, which is an absolute elephant in the space.
Your implementation so far feels creepy. You’re asking for location immediately on the marketing page (why?).
The marketing page seems to indicate that users are just going to disclose their exact current location and not be anonymous after the beta. The screenshots look like I’m going to reveal my location to strangers as a dot on a map. I don’t know if you’re really disclosing your users’ exact locations to each other or if they’re made more generalized but that seems like an immediate no thanks for just about anyone with any reasonable sense of threat evaluation.
I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, but your founder profile seems to be “two nerdy male college students.”
Can I ask you: do you think women would want to disclose their semi-precise location to strangers on the Internet? What’s the male to female ratio on this campus discord server you’re looking to capture the vibe from?
You also say this experience is trying to replicate the close community you have on discord. Why am I not just using discord? Spoiler alert: I’m already using discord with local people in my area.
Amazing portfolio project, I’m just not vibing with it as a business idea.