It's great to see that that kind of close, friendly, personal Internet dynamic didn't completely die with Facebook's rise.
Maybe that's not where the money is, but these private groups are so sticky that I don't currently see any alternative. People already know how to use Facebook, they don't know how to use Discord or Slack.
However the largest example is the London cyclist one https://www.lfgss.com . I started with cycling and the plan was to saturate one sport/recreational interest before branching out. So I run a lot of the cycle forums in the UK, from the Rapha one, through to Islington http://forum.islington.cc/ , Brixton https://forum.brixtoncycles.cc/ tiny clubs like Grupetto https://csgrupetto.microco.sm/
One of the newest is a sustainability forum for a group with a core around Cambridge but spread over the UK https://onething.is/
Some of the forums are private, and I'm fine with that as they can permission it the way they want and pull members from elsewhere as they see fit, i.e. the petrolheads in Cornwall.
Each forum is like a startup itself, they all have to find their first 10 users, then to get to 100 users, and to be aware of the 1% rule of internet culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
But I help nurture and guide, and show them how to do it.
Without funding I've slowed everything down though. It's funded by donations from users across sites today, but expansion risks cost cliffs as I'm just below the threshold for a few services I would need to pay for (auth0 free tier) and don't have time to engineer my way out. With neither time or money spare, it's stagnated.
But if someone wants a startup idea... this does work. Not wildly profitable, but it works.
How did it make money? I'd barely scratched the surface, but conversation around interest contains a lot of intent to purchase, and there are classifieds and meetups. So it's affiliates, a challenge against eBay (people into an interest have emotional attachment to the items and would rather sell to others into the interest), and ticketing for events, etc. And because it's all a platform, one instance, the traditional highs costs associated with running a forum were avoided. Lower costs, and actual revenues :)
I love what I do for work now, but I still believe this was an idea that is good for society.
The only thing that isn't is the very old puppet script that managed the deploy as it was rather bespoke for our setup.
To my own regret I focused far too much on making it an effective platform rather than an easy install, so that bit might feel gnarly but at least the errors are sane and guide you.
The Go API and PostgreSQL schemas: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microcosm
The Django frontend (the client is nothing but a thin client over the API) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb
The Bootstrap derived theme for the Django fronted https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb-bootstrap
And then other miscellaneous things:
The Go HTML sanitizer for user generated content https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday
Our legal policies for forums on this platform (expensive to produce, but perfectly fitting a forum platform with minimal exposure for the platform owner/admin and minimal but some liability for a forum owner) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal
There is also a newer thing, I was (/am?) intending to replace the Django layer with a Go frontend and templating, and then moving the API into this, such that the forum could become a single binary install and thus gain a new lease of life: https://github.com/buro9/microcosm . Once in a while I chip away on that.
But I haven't been able to do much other than keep it in maintenance mode for the last 4 years. I've let other forums be created and expanded it, but haven't had time to address it's flaws and improve it.
Curious, why you took offense to OPs post? If you are enjoying not having close friends, then good for you, really. This thread doesn't apply to you.
You remind me of Ricky Gervais' Guitar Lessons bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU
In summary, it's like calling up a guitar teacher and telling them you don't want to learn guitar. Why call?
He is on a self-professed quest to cure loneliness, and seems to equate that with not having close friendships. I just want to make sure he is aware there is a distinction and not everyone classifies that way.
It seemed to me that he was on a quest to cure his loneliness.
Point is: It's interesting (perhaps even revealing) that you read it differently.
If it's not a problem, then it's not a problem. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
> The lofty goal of the startup was to "cure loneliness" but I never told the users that.
And then he talks about building features for users to take their conversations offline. I mean maybe it was all for himself, but it seems like the goal was to get users to build long-lasting relationships.
Which is commendable, and I commend him for it. It sounds like an awesome project.
> If I were lonely today, I would say...
From your phrasing, it sounds like a pet peeve.
I don’t hate human interaction either. I have friends. I just don’t NEED them, and don’t need to go seeking them or be especially close.
Most people are not extroverts either, but extroverts in western culture get a pat on the back and a raise. Not as much elsewhere.
It's not a binary variable, but a spectrum.
Let me be utterly clear with you. I am not racist. Not one bone of my body is. And it is an extreme and personal insult to suggest that I am. There will be no further communication between us.
You second paragraph seems to continue onto an informed discussion that's not going to continue because of the immature comment in your first sentence.
This is an entirely different thing then Racism. Know the difference. Let's not let political correctness erase our ability to state things we believe to be biological facts.
If I were to say that you are an inferior race because you can or can't wiggle your ears and therefore must have inferior treatment.... THAT is racism. But the fact that I can wiggle my ears... well there's no denying that this ability is anomalous as I am simply describing a feature of reality as we know it..
Let me be utterly clear again. In the real world, in reality as we know it. There will ALWAYS exist things that are outside of the norm. Things that are "anomalous." To deny the existence of anomalies, or to deny the existence of REALITY is WRONG. This is not racism. To let political correctness control your dialogue and beliefs is as ignorant as letting religion do the same.
You are making two grave errors in your interpretation of reality.
First, what part of nature says EVERYTHING human must be a spectrum? There is no hard rule about this AT all. Things can have binary states, trinary states OR CAN exist in a spectrum. For example. I have a penis. Many people do not. That is binary. Perhaps a hermaphrodite lives on a spectrum but the scientific reality is, that the hermaphrodite is so few in number that it is in actuality a statistical anomaly. Lets get even deeper. Your DNA has 2 types of chromosomes. An X and a Y chromosome. There is no W chromosome and therefore these two chromosomes are binary DO NOT exist in a SPECTRUM. Get it?
Second, you don't even know what a "spectrum" really is. Even in a "spectrum" there can be anomalies. If you know about statistics you'd know that spectrums are usually bell curves: A hump in the middle with two tails on both sides.... The hump in the middle of the bell curve is the most populous and most "normal" part of the spectrum and the tail ends are the most rare and therefore "anomalous."
What disgust me is the twisting of words by people who are ignorant. There is NOTHING wrong with being anomalous... an anomaly is neither wrong or right it is just a word that illustrates rarity. A person with an IQ of 342 is an anomaly on the tail tail end of the bell curve and while it is an anomaly there is nothing wrong with being crazy smart.
This accusatory BS of calling me a racist is disgusting and vile and gravely serious. You better take back your statements, what your saying is not trivial or true and is a deeply personal insult. My ancestors were asian americans and victims of white supremacy and racism. If you're white and calling me racist well...
P.S. Most people don't want to be called an "anomoly". It sounds quite negative. I know you didn't mean it that way, but that is how other people interpret it.
Ok maybe I made mistake here. But the reaction to my mistake is that they decided to call me a racist. The difference here is that although I did not mean to convey what you implied... @AstralStorm and @Hermandw meant what they said 110%.
They accused me of being racist.
There is no one more guilty of racism against my race then the white man. So unless any of you are not white... back off.
Being introvert does not mean you are antisocial, you just don't need to socialize that much. It may be very enjoyable but it is also so draining.
There is a social aspect to my and human nature that cannot be denied.
One example: 99% of introverts want to have sex with the opposite gender and interact with them despite your introversion. A good number also want to have kids and interact with those kids. You may value your "recharge" time but despite this most introverts also seek to socialize and interact with other people. It's a conflicting desire, but to be human is to be social, you cannot deny biology.
Look at the way humans live. We live in cities, towns or tribes. A very very small amount of us live in isolation outside of towns, tribes and cities. I would argue that most introverts live in a community and are unwilling to go far enough to live in total isolation. We are animals that live in groups. We are herd animals. My guess is that introversion stems from defensive instincts designed to deal with creatures outside of the herd.
My path to doing this was to encourage interest based communication, in a way that would allow them to take it offline. How? Well to make it interest + geography, i.e. horology nerds in Cumbria, cyclists in London, petrol heads in Cornwall, audiophiles in Suffolk.
By binding together an interest, and a geography, it naturally encourages trade, showing off, having a beer... and coming together. But not in a way that ever was to "cure loneliness" (which few people admit to feeling, and frankly most people find lonely people unattractive people from the perspective of wishing to hang out with someone like that).
By providing a space to share a passion, the forums brought people together.
I had to make our own software to achieve this, i.e. a forum with events built-in by default, etc. But it worked.
Except I couldn't get it funded beyond the crowd-funded angel round :shrug . But still, 250k monthly users, hundreds of marriages, tens of thousands of friendships, and still people meeting weekly for beer and chatting with others.
And like all love, when the lust is gone what remains is something special... these forums are evolving now, from the original interests, into just a group of friends for life.
If I were lonely today, I would say... identify a hobby or interest you could get into, start looking for entry things to dive in, and then look for groups on MeetUp, or forums online, that will help you find other people.