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A feed of only your people

A small, paid or non-profit network showing friends' and family's own updates in order, with no news sharing, ads or suggested posts.

11asks, each re-read
11separate threads
9of 19 years
2since 2024
2010first asked

Asks per year

’081’10’121’141’1611’182’202’221’241’26

What the askers want

  • Would pay27%
  • Want it local or private0%
  • Object to subscriptions0%
  • Want it open source or self-hosted0%
  • Want AI to do it0%

Share of the 11 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.

What exists on Show HN

Built, still asked for14 Show HN launches do this job, and 6 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.

Instead of: Facebook, Instagram

The idea, as matched

A small, ad-free social network just for real friends and family, showing a chronological feed of personal updates and photos with no algorithm, news sharing or influencers, often paid for by users.

Jev first matched 13 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 11 of 13.

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Several say they would pay.

  1. Apr 2025Wants a smaller network showing only friends, family and people they know, without irrelevant feed content. Read it: a comment in “The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state”
  2. Feb 2024Wants a social network of friends with chronological posts only, no tagged notices, suggestions, shorts or heavy ads. Read it: a comment in “First-gen social media users have nowhere to go”
  3. Oct 2021Wants a site like early Facebook again, built on real human interactions with people they know. Read it: a comment in “Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit”
  4. Aug 2021Wants a platform for friends to share personal text updates and photos, with news sharing and copy-paste blocked. Read it: a comment in “Social media should be treated like the tobacco companies”
  5. Jun 2020Wants a simple, non-profit Facebook-style app so they can leave Facebook yet keep in touch with friends abroad. Read it: a comment in “Leave Facebook”
  6. Feb 2020Wants a clean, ideally paid app for updates from far-away friends, like the old Path but without spam. Read it: a comment in “Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety”
  7. Mar 2018Wants a stripped-down Facebook without a newsfeed, where sharing is limited to groups like family or college friends. Read it: a comment in “Towards a world without Facebook”
  8. May 2017Wants a friends-and-family-only Facebook without link sharing, but still showing followed musicians' posts. Read it: a comment in “Instagram Is Becoming Facebook’s Next Facebook”
  9. Feb 2015Would pay for a privacy-respecting social network with a beautiful interface that does not filter content out. Read it: a comment in “Get your loved ones off Facebook”
  10. Oct 2014Would happily pay a yearly subscription for a simple, ad-free social network that respects privacy. Read it: a comment in “Tsū: A social network that shares its advertising revenue with its users”
  11. Oct 2010Suggests a family-only Facebook that some people would pay for. Read it: a comment in “[dead]”

Building this?

Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.

See all 100How the counts work

Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own

This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.

Get your own box

$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.