I met him through church and at work. Maybe we have some other mutual interests.

How do I know Joe?

Coincidentally also through church and work, but we're both programmers (Jack is an engineer with different technical interests), we play soccer together, we enjoy seeing movies in the theater, and we participate in team trivia at restaurants and bars together.

By tagging people (or placing them into circles in the G+ sense), I can select which group to communicate something to based on selecting a tag or set of tags. "Hey soccer peeps, I'm going to take my ball and some cones down to the field at Central Elementary this Saturday if you want to come out and practice with me." directed @soccer_peeps.

Maybe throw a few groups together that aren't fully overlapping in general: @soccer_peeps @trivia_teamsters "Party at my place this Saturday, here's a link to RSVP and sign up to bring something."

I'm not forced to put everyone into a distinct category or circle, but can use loose taggings effectively.

Option 1 is for content that won't offend anyone or tarnish the author's reputation. The audience can include all contacts including coworkers, family, etc. and the author will often use their real name. Example: Facebook.

Option 2 is for risqué content. It could cause issues with employment and other real-life relations. The audience must be carefully controlled, or if not, a pseudonym (that only a carefully controlled audience, if anyone at all, can map to a real name) must be used. Example: Reddit; private group chats.

This seems to cover most scenarios without the overhead/stress of trying to shoehorn all of these boundaries in a single platform/app.

Option 3 is for very personal stuff that you don't want to make public. Many of us put photos of our small children in this category. On a more depressing note, this could also include things like grief that a small group experiences over serious illness or death in the family. Not everything non-public is necessarily risque.

(FWIW I'm working on something in this space. Hoping to have something to share within another month or two...)

Separate icons on ones launcher go a long way toward maintaining intent.

You setup your circles for various topics.

Neat idea. Complete failure.

I’ve set up social interactions for major companies. Basically any restriction on who can see what will kill the feature.

I think that's likely true for social media apps where the product is "free" in that users are the product and advertisers are the customers that fund it. In that business model, your number one goal is to maximize eyeballs.

But Haven doesn't have that business model at all, so it's not clear to me that a way to control who sees what posts would harm success.

By analogy, farmers want to grow as many plants per acre as they possibly can to maximize revenue. The idea of potting their plants individually makes no sense. But if I just want a plant on my windowsill and don't want dirt everywhere, a pot is what I want.

Any talk of tech people and farmers seems to always change to pot.

Probably the big risk for this thing is that nobody wants to keep track of separate websites for dozens of individuals, most of whom only post something they can see once a week at most. You need to aggregate all of those updates from dozens of people you know into a single website and build a feed, then you have something that probably always has something the user might find interesting, and all in one place, so they'll actually check it regularly.

Instead, have a system where you can categorize your posts and other people can explicitly opt-in or opt-out to following particular categories.

That way, you can do a series of detailed posts on Orson Welles (say) for interested parties without worrying about whether you’ll bore or scare off the rest of your friends.

That seriously pissed me off.

https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/doxxing-that-cau...

Who can see this:

    x  Family
    x  Friends
    0  Co-workers
    0  Quiddich team (custom group)

This is the same issue as group messaging in most instant message type systems (including SMS/MMS). It's forcing a full connection between all participants, when really we may only want a fan-out structure.

I haven't used it much (not as many people on it in my social circles) but WhatsApp's broadcast lists are like G+ circles in this regard.

You could use some combination of the two sets of controls to provide pretty granular privacy control over all sorts of things.

- It should be able to easily upload photos and videos from my phone

- everything is link-private, not on Google.

- it has to be very easy for the least tech savvy to view photos/videos. Needs to work on many devices, even old browsers on older PCs out there. Possibly even to the point of printing and mailing people the images.

- photos/videos need to be long-lived, I want to view these 30 years from now

- space for kids to post messages to their family. Family can respond easily

- I own everything and grant no rights to a giant mega Corp

- it should be possible to notify family members via email when new content is posted.

I don’t have all those, but these are my ideal.

b. i think every browser is worth it, and some of these classics are very nice.

c. it,s not very limiting because html and js allow for progressive enhancement.

i started out wanting to just be accessible. then i saw a cool exhibit at mfa with beige boxes, win95, netscape 3, and older web creations.

i realized it wouldn,t be that hard, i wanted to support nn3 for classic retro reasons.

then i realized that with a few tweaks, i can cover the whole range.

i really want to be able to say, yes, it will work with your device.

i have older ipads i can still use for writing now.

> Haven is about sharing privately with friends and family. There is no option to make your blog public to the world.

Have a designer give the site a distinctive visual identity, including a logo. Once it's ready, expand that visual identity into the Haven application itself.

At the moment, the site feels a bit generic. That's not meant as a slight; just an observation.

The US is now feeling the effects of having single websites with millions of pages. It was a stupid idea and is damaging to society. Super high scalability should only be for government websites and the like.

On a related note, We need something like bit torrent for video. Where the chunks would come approximately in order and watchers effectively host a copy for the entire time they are watching. So we can all self host arbitrary length videos to all our friends on that same Rpi.

  > For technical people, self-hosting is made easy with a one-line AWS deployment script, *and an install script for the Raspberry Pi Zero W.*

Which, to me, sounds pretty great! But at the same time, MySpace lost

It's possible MySpace lost to Facebook in a very different landscape than we have today, as far as people's perception of privacy, and curated feeds, and politics, etc. So maybe your project won't share its fate. Though it might be worth studying its success and failure anyway

Anyway: good luck! I think you've got a clear vision and I'd love to see it succeed

Edit: One question, does a user need a separate account for every site they subscribe to? If so that could be pretty inconvenient. If my family wanted to use this in place of Facebook to stay in touch, that's N^2 user accounts. Not sure what the solution would be (an optional, centralized server purely for authentication and permissions?)

I used Oauth for signup, which made it easy to share links to galleries via e.g. Facebook and then click through using Facebook login. I also went for a more open model where anyone could log in but I could block people later on if I didn’t want to share. Depending on how sensitive a particular piece of content is, both models would probably better. It seems important to minimise friction as much as possible or people just move on. Come back later when I’ve approved you is not a good model, I found people simply lost interest.

I realise you're doing this primarily for people to share personal content, but there's plenty of people out there that want to share personal thoughts to a large part of the world but just don't want to get censored by FB and your solution could work well for them.

Have you considered a blog, or even a newsletter?

It's probably worth asking OP what their position on censorship is before suggesting this. It's shocking to me, but many in the tech community are very pro censorship (though they will call it "moderation" since it's not happening to them).

Also if a customer of OP's got big enough and was controversial enough, AWS could threaten their account if they don't terminate that user's pages. So even if OP is a free speech absolutist, it still may not be a solution to the problem of big tech censorship.

If I were to explore public posting on Haven, then censorship/moderation becomes an issue. Public posting is outside of the focus I want to have and this would just make it more complicated for Haven so I'm not planning to explore anything that lets you "grow your audience"--I'm focusing on private sharing with your existing community.

Short of that though -- if a private company like Facebook or Twitter declines to host your content, that is entirely their right. It's not a public utility.

Free speech means you can say whatever you like. It doesn't mean you have a right to a platform and an audience.

And host it where exactly?

And so my question.

Also the author checked in a credentials and a master key to github

Rails uses the "master key" to let you check in encrypted database credentials. I don't use that but Rails still requires a key for deployment--so I just checked in a key. Rails is really designed for a codebase that matches to a single deployment so this is a bit of a workaround.

[1] https://github.com/heartcombo/devise

It's safe to bet that someone will deploy this and use that master key instead of generating their own.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

"If running it yourself is too daunting, we can host it for you on your own dedicated virtual server for as little as $5 per month."

I understand the Wordpress pain. My solution was to pay Wordpress.com $35/year to give me a hosted Wordpress instance. There is just one switch you need to flip to make the whole thing private. Family members have access through their own usernames.

> Twitter is more about “see what interesting people are saying”.

> For these reasons we're offing to host a Haven for you