If I understand correctly, this is thoroughly different from "social media." In fact, it looks like "connections" are all but irrelevant - only "conversations" matter. Of course, conversations are richest when you have an understanding of the other participants background and depth of knowledge, so you can explore, test, debate and grow your own knowledge, or adjust your beliefs.

My impression is that Lyra targets a niche of individuals that "enjoy conversing." I'm not sure if there's a nexus, a central target topic of conversation (like a sub-reddit would have) or a connective tissue such as real-life familiarity (like a friends and family social network would have) to hold your users together.

Can you elaborate on who your target audience is, and how they will be attracted to the site, or what will maintain their interest (while avoiding the trap of making their engagement addictive?)

Connections are relevant in the form of groups, which are private to you: you use them to set conversation audiences and control whose conversations appear in your news feed.

Our target audience is those who want to converse online without the restraints and commitments of social media services which aim to addict rather than to support and convey language.

We don't aim to enable the discovery of interesting links - Reddit has this completely down. But it's no good for conversing in a focussed way with people you know.

Letters and email link people internationally in ways that are impossible on Facebook or Twitter. When you receive an email, you read it in a focussed space without distractions; and you're aware of the fact that it was personally sent to you as opposed to broadcast to a large channel. Narrowcast will always be a personal experience than coming across a message delivered by a mysterious algorithm.

Lyra does have a public news feed in which conversations are viewable to all users. If you add people to your groups and set the feed to view only these, it's the exact equivalent of Facebook.

What we don't do is offer particular spaces (hashtags or subfora) because these instantly offer a target for harrassment and abuse, and require moderation. Lyra's design makes it trivial for people and topics which are vulnerable to abuse, to control their reading and avoid it.

As for engagement, we are reliant on guerilla marketing and links with aligned groups. And as for maintenance of interest - Lyra is a very pleasant space for written conversations. By default, (configurable) you get an email when someone starts a conversation with you or replies to one of your messages, so you're informed of activity. Conversations between 2 people or small groups are a lot of fun.

I've thought about this issue, but it seems like any type of advertising or program that refuses to respect boundaries and pushes psychological buttons is bound to win over a product that does not.

Is this a concern internally?

This is true if the market is an inert resource, ripe for exploitation. However, the market is beginning to realise that social media is at the moment a bad actor, and that their attention is being traded as a commodity. This realisation will bring a massive exodus towards services which respect users and language.

I'm already looking at setting myself up with a private Mastodon instance for my friends, I never liked the idea of funnelling my life into a service I don't own and I don't think my friends do either.

Mastodon is great, but its nature makes it inaccessible to those who would benefit most from open discourse and conversation: the layman. It's got a high barrier because it's aimed at the more technologically literate.

It's no harder to register an account on any public Mastodon instance than it is to register for Facebook. In fact, it is arguably easier, since Facebook often requires phone number verification nowadays.

That's true, but the distributed, decentralised nature is something that the layman is often not interested in understanding, and so can turn people off the network. Neither does it have a cuddly name!

> I used to work for a social network. We used to have 3-hour meetings every week to discuss how to get the users addicted and keep them that way.

This makes me curious. How was the company culture while you were there? Did the company treat its employees any better?

No, management had no respect for the developers or marketing team. The company eventually folded. But I made some friends and got to learn Ruby!

We just made a demo conversation to show how Lyra works without having to log in :)

https://hellolyra.com/c/343

Have you seen the Imzy submission [1]? People have argued that they failed because there was no content on their front page. Why have who chosen to require logins?

>1. No front page (for lurkers): They force users to join to be able to view content. The 90/9/1 rule is real, ESPECIALLY in the "community" space. 90% of users just want to lurk and that's just the nature of the internet. It's probably the same here on HN. 9% will participate in some ways, voting, etc. 1% will submit and comment, etc.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411499

This is a very valid point. We are considering adding an option to view conversations without login, but we feel that this should not be the default behaviour (there is an expectation of privacy) but would only be used were it the default.

We just added a large "view example conversation" button on the landing page which doesn't require login :)

Poor Imzy! We could do great things with $11 million

I'm building tool[1] for myself to organize book reviews, my essays, quotes based on same principles and inspired by writings of Joe Edelman and Tristan Harris. Lyra looks really nice [1] https://montaigne.io/

Why does the text on your homepage require javascript to be visible?

We use JS for comment layout because it's NP-complete, try that in a markup language!

it will not have javascript in the future. it just very early version. but thanks for the comment

Montaigne looks very nice and we like the name. But it says "Thank you for joining beta. We'll let you know when it's ready.", what do we do?

>Lyra, an open, ethical conversation platform

While the concept seems really interesting, what do you mean by "open" in this context? For example, are you able to export your data? (I wasn't able to find anything about that on the site.)

By "open" we mean that the platform does not discriminate against any particular groups (for example, by requiring real names) and that its feed algorithms and behaviour have a clear and simple meaning.

We are completely open to offering data export, it's on the medium-term feature plan. For now we will do a manual JSON dump for anyone who asks.