Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with your closest friends

Re:Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with y... by PhilippGille on Saturday June 25, 2022 @05:30PM (#31878882)

Looks pretty polished already, good job! And sounds interesting. It's a good focus on one thing which is important as differentiator to other social networks. In the past there was Path [1] which allowed only 50 friends, but was more generic. It's also great to go freemium from the start instead of ads or trying to be fully free until you run out of money.

Some questions that I didn't find answered in the FAQ or elsewhere:

- Why does the birth year go into the app settings and not the profile? And 1950 is the default?

- What's the Ferris tag in the app? Like a "secret" identifier? In the settings section maybe this coulb be explained a bit.

- In the app settings notifications are off by default. Is that intended? It's nice as it reduces distraction, but with the interactions on the app being less frequent already (one activity every now and then per friend with just 20 friends) I can imagine notifications being necessary to build traction (not the app itself, but also as a participant, when planning activities, I probably would like my friends to know without them having to actively open the app, especially for spontaneous activities).

- I can only add friends when knowing their Ferris tag. When a friend doesn't use the app yet, I have to explain what it is myself. Maybe you could add an "invite via mail/link" feature, where the friend (not on Ferris yet) sees an explanation what Ferris is, can sign up and then automatically the Ferris friends relationship is established

Good luck with the project!

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Re:Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with y... by earlyriser on Saturday June 25, 2022 @05:45PM (#31878978)

Hi!

- Birth year. This is not part of the profile because usually your friends know your age. It's a way to internally know which demography is using the app more. It's the only part of the app that is Ferris focuses instead of user focused. I debated if I just simply add a yyyy-mm-dd input and give the user the benefit of remembering their friends birthdays (as plenty of apps), but the day of birth is way more personal than the year, so I scrapped that part. I maybe need to add a tooltip explaining why I'm asking this. 1950 is just a number I don't think 99% of my users will have.

- Ferristag: it's a secret identifier. If you go to Friends > Add Friend, you can see your Ferristag. You copy and send it.

- Notifications: I went with the option of making the explicit choices, but I if you have no notifications activated you will see a reminder, once that you add a friend. It looks premature to ask for notifications permission before this could be useful. But yes, notification handling is maybe something I could make better.

- Email invites: I thought about this, but finally rejected because it loses the personal touch and it looks spammy most of the time, or that my friend is getting a commission lol. I could rethink this based on feedback.

Thanks!

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Re:Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with y... by somenewaccount1 on Sunday June 26, 2022 @01:04AM (#31881248)

Without a way to email or text a link, 1) as he said above, i am not your sales person and will not likely convince people to start using this app. 2) it requires my friend sign up, and then off-app give me thier deets so I can whitelist them. Seems un-necessarily complicated. Just don't do creepy things with the data and put that in your messaging.

Good luck!

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Re:Show HN: Ferris, social network for IRL activities with y... by earlyriser on Sunday June 26, 2022 @11:42AM (#31884973)

This has been a blind spot for me, thanks for reiterating the feedback. I'll add a pre-filled email on the next iteration.

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