Of course they don't care about people. The social network that the members enjoy is merely a side-effect of the true business. Sort of like the fact that a cow pasture is not really about the cows' enjoyment but, when you get down to it, hamburgers. Amazingly most people are still as oblivious to this concept as cows are before becoming hamburgers.

What I am wondering about is the possibility of a social network that is deliberately and intentionally about being JUST a social network and NOT some kind of complex mechanism for market research and exploitation.

I think the obstacle there is momentum and critical mass. Nobody uses askjeeves.com because Google has mindshare.

If you were to build this hypothetical pure social media communication platform we'd still have to find it, it'd have to be funded, maintained, and improved. Even then it's useful only if you can get your network on it.

Money is the root of all evil and will pervade into whatever is next. It's only human nature.

You can see examples of this with https://diasporafoundation.org/ and https://gab.ai/ -> these platforms and ideas exist but they have a raindrop in a bucket of usershare.

I'm not an expert in this field but I think about it a lot. Thanks for discussion, HN.

Maybe we're all thinking about this in a way that's too constrained?

The theoretical dream of cyberspace, back in the 60-80's, before "the web" (as we know it) was that merely being "online" automatically put you in a global community: a place where distance no longer mattered, and where _all_ text is part of one giant hypertext. This was roughly the idea as described by Ted Nelson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson).

I think there's a way for this theoretical concept to be realized without dependence on exploitative commerce-oriented websites, and perhaps, without dependence on websites period. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that will be like in reality.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a couple of months now. I really like the idea of an open-source social network, maybe supported in part or in full by crowdfunding via something like Patreon. If the intention is connection rather than profit, you'd mostly just need to cover server/hosting fees. Of course, that's still not a cheap proposition.

But I'd rather have a small network focused on good connections than a large network focused on invading and selling user data, and maybe a smaller network could be managed by user contributions over investments that lead to treating users as the product.

Open source social networks already exist, for example GNU Social and Mastodon which form part of the Fediverse.

I'll look those two up - thanks for the tip!