>Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.

There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").

Group chats are such a poor substitute though. On 00’s Facebook you could post once for all of your friends to see, and they didn’t have to all know each other.

I find group chats to be a pretty excellent solution, though I am less gregarious than average. Occasionally I post something in multiple groups or create a new "temporary" group in order to share it with people from different circles; this creates some detritus but not often to the point of being much of a downside.

The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too. They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.

On 00s Facebook your friends had to visit your timeline to see your post as there was no feed.

> On 00’s Facebook you could post once for all of your friends to see, and they didn’t have to all know each other.

I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.

>> It is quite bizarre we call them social networks.

They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.

The thing is, Facebook was never awesome. Really. Never.

It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad.

And it’s easy to quit. Really.

In my opinion, there is no way that early Facebook was reducing happiness and life satisfaction in aggregate. I doubt you were a Facebook user in that period if that’s your perception. It was so benign in the early days.

If I wasn't on Facebook then I wouldn't have been able to join my local running group. That is one demonstration of how it has increased my happiness by me being on it. However, if Facebook didn't exist then the running group would probably use some other platform so in aggregate Facebook hasn't improved things; just made it easier for groups to organise.

Nah, it was good in ‘04 ‘05. Being able to see photos other people took of you at parties was a novelty and was welcome. It was like a phone book with photos.

Even later the groups function was great for many.

On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.

It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up

That's fediverse. It's all run by people who can't be arsed running an ad network, and because it's federated the users can just go elsewhere if you did try something like that.

Makes me think of the shift from reality TV (real people living authentically on TV) to “reality TV” (the genre with it’s specific formulas/tropes/manipulation).

Your first one never existed.

Early Big Brother immediately comes to mind

> Maybe you can only have 100 connections and you can’t post links or rants. Just life updates and photos.

Many I’ve been exposed to wouldn’t know what to post if it wasn’t regurgitated content or rants.

We could go back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter: “I’m having toast! And it’s not burned!”

It could be an improvement.

There is one, it's called Hallo. I have it and don't have a single friend on it yet which is a shame. There's a few more "healthy rules" like no influencers, no more than 100 friends, etc.

I believe Path tried to do this too, and failed.

If you can make something that is 10x better than group chats, there may be a market. I'm assuming that someone soon will come up with something.