You're probably not the target audience. I'd bet ~98% of the people on HN aren't.

The app is aiming at the Instagram, Snapchat crowd. Instagram didn't have a web front until recently, Snapchat still doesn't.

I have no idea who they think they're targeting but there's still a huge amount of friction involved in getting users to install an app. I don't think that a younger audience is immune to that.

Have you seen kids using Instagram and (especially) SnapChat?

Younger generations have a very different relationship to their devices than someone born, say, in the 70's or 80's has.

They care very little about websites.

Instagram and Snapchat made names for themselves by being novel, simple, immediate... You can explain in one sentence to your friends what's cool about them: "you can make your photos look great and see your friend's photos" and "you send quick selfies and they're deleted in like ten seconds so you don't have to care so much".

This hello.com seems like a much broader kind of "social network" that I would have a hard time getting any of my friends or family to try, I think.

No web version which also means there's probably noting really new or revolutionary. No federation. Not open.

I've been messing with some of the old federated projects that never seemed to go anywhere. GNU Social, Diaosapra, etc.

I'd like to just get a few nerd friends on one, just to say I'm at least trying to get away from the current model.

Hello just looks like another ello.

The real federated social platform is WordPress, which has millions of deployments and serves a quarter of the most popular websites: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...

I still remember the time around ten years ago when a lot of people had independent blogs mostly free of clickbait and advertising. Nowadays, many post on social media only.

I wrote nearly the same thing last week. "I remember meritocracy, I remember trackbacks..." HN definitely helps to amplify the independent WP blogs' news. I was thinking, maybe there's a way to do P2P ranking/voting/tagging of headlines just using JavaScript, maybe it's an embed code, and that could disrupt Twitter in terms of surfacing important news items without censorship. But how scary would it turn out without censorship?

Wordpress is not a federated platform, unless one wants to redefine federation.

In networked software, to be federated means users are able to send messages from one independent deployment to the other. In WordPress, this is achieved using linkbacks and feeds. So how would you define federation?

After Gravatars, I figured they'd try to disrupt Facebook with some kind of P2P plugin, like a Fidonet. But it never happened. Instead we got Disqus and IntenseDebate and bbPress...

RSS can be considered a federated protocol, maybe...if you stretch the definition.

With RSS, you can subscribe to feeds with any standard reader. Interestingly enough, YouTube channels all have RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to them without needing to do so via a Google account.