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jona-f
kube-system
Domain squatting is when you buy a domain purely for speculation with no intent of using it.
This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
rafram
He founded a domain brokerage for squatters and seems to be squatting on other domains for ad revenue (read the section about the trade he made).
Dave0X
Domain registration for the purpose of resale is legit. Plenty of available names and extensions to choose from.
aswegs8
Doesn't strike me as particularly immoral.
pavon
Agreed. The main problem with domain squatting and sniping is scammers either trying to impersonate another organization, or extort trademark owners into paying insane amount of money to obtain a domain which has no legitimate use to the current holder. Neither are happening here. Friendster intentionally let the domain and trademark go, and there isn't any entity that holds a legitimate claim to that name anymore.
I don't think that old business names should be "retired" and forever banned from use. After a certain amount of time the name should be free for someone to use again, and 10 years of non-use seems reasonable to me. The main concern with reuse is confusing consumers into thinking they are dealing with the old friendster, but I think consumers are savvy enough to realize that an old trademark rising from the dead often has nothing to do with the original, regardless of whether the current trademark holders purchased rights from the original, or claimed abandoned ones, as in this case.
His other business dealings aside, I don't have a problem with how he obtained/revived the friendster domain and trademark.
codingdave
Considering how little is actually interesting about the app aside from it using an old domain, my impression is that the entire post is just pseudo-marketing, attempting to encourage people to get back into domain name squatting.
camillomiller
Well this vibecoded chatgpt crap is quite clearly an attempt at making Friendster more valuable than 30k
arthurgibson
A little over reaction here, they were very open about the process. Lets not take down the horse before the carriage. The article mentions they started "park.io" which was backordering domains, so at minimum expertise and some relevancy exists (was acquired).
Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
hacker161
Their reaction is perfectly proportional
ca98am79
Curious what you’d consider a better model for naming/ownership on the internet.
skeeter2020
I don't necessarily support any of these, but it's essentially a solved problem when discussing the supply side - especially for artificial scarcity:
* lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate
* taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment
* going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities
* qualitative usage can define treatment
* lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served
You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
brynnbee
ICANN's main process for handling trademark-based complaints is the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This policy is used for instances where someone claims you registered a domain in bad faith that matches their trademark, and they have a panel that looks at whether you have "rights or legitimate interests" in the name. Bad faith evaluations by this policy often involves intent to sell the domain to the trademark owner, disrupt their business, or attract users by confusion.
So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one.
Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, etc. And whether the effort or investment put into the site matches a ballpark of the value of a domain name.
I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
Barbing
Wait people are upset, do the Friendster founders want their URL back?!
Maybe I glossed over something
skeeter2020
I think it was more about how the OP talks about the backstory, and likely how they got the resources to do this.
phrotoma
IIUC it's not the model of buying domains from registrars which stinks of crap, it's the buying from registrars by domain squatters who then flip them for a profit having provided zero value that bears a whiff of shite. These ticket scalpers of the internet who contribute nothing can well and truly fuck straight off.
mothballed
Speculators provide time-allocation of resources. They're pretty critical part of market dynamics to help resources get sold and developed when they are valued most. That is, they prevent domains from being captured prematurely for lower value use. Society profits immensely from their contribution.
wussboy
I don't need to be able to cure cancer to tell you that cancer is terrible.
jona-f
The tragedy of the commons is real. I have no good idea how to solve it, but I know that you are the problem. Your domain squatting ad bullshit adds zero value to society, but it does a lot of harm. It is increasingly hard to find good information between all the spam and the energy cost is immense. Your greed to the detriment of everybody else.
Public ridicule, denunciation and mobbing works somewhat, better in countries with more societal coherence then the US, not that I'm a big fan of that, quite the opposite. In your case though, I think you shouldn't get any positive attention for anything you say besides "sorry what I did, let me help undo the harm".
johnfn
We must have read a different article because I read a neat one about how someone bought a domain no one was using.
_vertigo
It’s just an externality of online advertising
oefrha
You don’t need to propose a better model of the world to despise the dirtbags profiting from legal but icky shit in this world.
Dave0X
This comment sounds like entitlement and anti-capitalist.
i386
I kinda fucking love it. He’s doing something. It’s interesting. There’s no scam. Let live!
Dave0X
Some people clearly believe if you have money sitting in a bank, other people should be able to take it. They feel your money should help others. If you're not actively using it.
saghm
> He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin.
> So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.
I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)?
I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.
julianeon
You are absolutely right and that jumped out at me. I should also point out the obvious: if people were selling online assets making $9k/year for $9k, there would be a line out the door of people lining up to buy them. If anyone here is selling an asset that makes $X a year for $X, I'll buy it! I make my money back in 12 months and everything else is profit.
So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.
So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."
[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]
ipaddr
There are tons of those offers. Carefull that 9k revenue doesn't come from $9000 of ads.
elphinstone
I doubt gray market sites have any kind of longterm value or predictable revenues. Who knows what kind of site it was, but to be valued so lowly the regulatory risk might be very high.
timr
Yeah, but you have to scale the projections for uncertainty about the future, and exaggeration by the seller.
In particular, if someone on the internet tells me they’re making $x a month from spammy ads on a squatted domain, I immediately discount the claim substantially due to bullshit. I increase the discount rate if the person making the claim is trying to sell me said domain.
julianeon
True, but if the guy contacting you is the actual owner of the website you use to buy domains, his credibility increases enormously. He said this person was a customer on his platform. When that guy says "I have a website which is making 10k/year," and I already trust the domain platform he created because I use it as a customer, I believe him.
vel0city
Projected revenues for this domain is at $100k this year!
How much are you trying to sell the domain for?
Uhh...about $100k.
wongarsu
If you had a steady investment opportunity with 10% return (about in line with long-terms stock market returns), $9000 per year indefinitely is worth the same as $99000 now (in an idealized finance world. In the real world you can't invest $99000 and withdraw $9000 per year because withdrawals during downturns will take out too much. But it's a quick way to calculate equivalent values).
That's obviously an upper bound, because those domains won't make $9000/year forever. But valuing them at $10k if they make $9k/year is equally unsound. Not to mention the domain is worth more than its ad revenue. You could also end up selling it to a company that came up with the name and saw that the domain is available for purchase for some reasonable 4-5 figure amount (like in the example of this very article, where someone buys a domain for a five-figure amount)
Obviously there is a lot we don't know (is the $9k pure profit or are there substantial costs? How likely is the domain to sell?), but it sounds like the seller got the better end of the deal. He got more than $40k in value, in return the author got a deal he could afford
mogrinz
I have a calendaring site (won't mention it here b/c I don't want to be seen as plugging it) that has been generating revenue from ads and subscriptions for 26 years now. At its peak, well over 100k/yr but now more like 15k/yr for the past 5 years. Still a very steady income b/c the site is sticky. The only expense I have is about $3k every 36/mo for VPS hosting. At this point the code base is so mature that I only do minimal user support. I've looked into selling but people only want to offer 2x annual revenue. Why would I do that when I can just hold onto it for another year? I wish more people saw the math your way.
cestith
I would have several questions before negotiating seriously, and I could actually be in the market for such a beast.
At what multiple would you be comfortable considering selling? If revenue has dropped 85% from its peak, have you identified the cause of the drop? Has it been steady that past five years? Do you have a record of the time spent on it, or does it just feel minimal? How much of revenue is from ads vs subscriptions? Is it sticky mainly because a user can’t export things and import them to Google Calendar or something?
Is it custom software, heavily customized software, or are you basically selling the calendaring component of something like Citadel or Horde? What languages are in use? Does the buyer get just the site or full ownership of the codebase and the rights to derive new products and services from it? Does it come with the domain and trademarks?
Are you selling outright, or are you reserving some royalty for yourself?
What does the handover look like? Does the buyer just get an email with URLs and login credentials, or do you plan on familiarizing a buyer with the whole thing?
55555
The main reason this is an issue is that it's a lemon market. Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified. Even without lies, no one knows the truth of your business like you do. The unfortunate result of this -- and I've been in a similar position in the past -- is that you are incentivized to lazily run things into the ground slowly rather than find a new owner who may bring new passion.
killingtime74
Good analysis. if I was the author I would have just borrowed 20k in a personal loan and paid it off in three years. Of course he may be exaggerating that he gets 9K in Ad revenue per year or he knows that it's going to decline
QuantumNomad_
I imagine that $9k ad revenue is a site that had an actual user base. And that the guy taking over the domain is going to just put all ads and no content, like he had on Friendster.com. And if so, the expected ad income is probably much lower.
prettyblocks
I believe it's 9k/year in parking revenue.
wileydragonfly
Nobody gets 10% a year
sarchertech
S&P 500 average return over the last 5, 10, 50, and 100 years was higher than that.
bell-cot
...unless there's considerable uncertainty about future payments. Happily for the sellers of dubious assets, the world never seems to run out of people who can't resist a deal that's too good to be true.
chillfox
From what I can tell, The upper bound on price for any site making less than 100k a month is 24 months of revenue, but the more common is around 12 months.
The buyer takes on substantial risk because it's easy to fake the numbers, and google updates can tank the site at any time.
Also, most sites will require maintenance/upkeep to keep earning, or they can tank quick. Even if they have got evergreen content, without updates google might drop their search ranking.
ertgbnm
Well did they sell the website too? Or just the domain? Because the domain doesn't generate ad revenue, the original website did. Like just because I sell the domain name for my blog doesn't mean you also get the content of my blog too.
soared
You can check out similar sales on flippa.com - ad revenue does not last forever, even if it’s existed for years. And revenue is very much not profit, you could create a site and get $100/day in ad revenue tomorrow but it would cost you $200 in ad spend.
eucyclos
What does the spend go to, besides hosting costs?
thrownthatway
Advertising costs, to drive traffic to your site(s).
Someone
They said “a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue”, not “a domain that was making about $9k/year in profits”.
Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.
fluoridation
>Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular.
That's not investment, that's just the cost of upkeep. It's possible you simply cannot afford to keep up with that expense rate, but the fact remains that it's net profit. With a $100k investment and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you lost $91k. With a yearly $100k cost and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you earned $9k. No matter how you slice it it's a money-printing machine. The question is much it cost you to buy the machine, not how much it costs you to run it, because you'd be a fool to turn it off.
andy_ppp
If Friendster.com was making around $9,000 per year, this would explain why paying $30k + domains returning a similar amount would make sense?
treatmesubj
discounted cash flows - DCF
NikolaosC
A guy bought friendster.com for $30k and built an app where you can only add friends by physically tapping phones. Connections "fade" if you don't meet in a year. Sounds wholesome. Also sounds like a feature set that filters out 90% of the people who'd actually use a social network
QuantumNomad_
I tried to search for Friendster in the App Store and didn’t see it among the first few results. Instead, App Store was returning a sponsored ad followed by normal results for all other kinds of similar annd less similar apps. Instagram, Snapchat, Yubo (never heard of), Monopoly Go (mobile game related to the board game Monopoly), BeFriend (never heard of), Tinder, Friendly Social Browser (never heard of), Facebook, and at that point I stopped scrolling the results.
For a moment I thought maybe the app was US exclusive or something and not available in my region.
But following the link from the post worked fine and I could install it.
I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
Anyway, installed the app finally thanks to the link.
aprilnya
When a new app is released, it takes a few days for it to get into search, for some reason. Pretty much every single time a new app releases I see a comment like this. Nothing malicious you just have to wait a bit.
TheDong
> Nothing malicious
The first result is a sponsored result, and even after Friendster is indexed, if they don't pay apple's extortion-rate, the first result will still be for some other social media app.
Ads in the app store are malicious. There are people who have searched "Ledger bitcoin wallet", clicked the first link (a malicious app who paid apple enough money to be 'sponsored' for that search), and had all their money stolen.
hiccuphippo
Well they are domain squatters so they known how this extortion business works.
mapt
I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.
My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.
mghackerlady
We need a FOSS nonprofit search engine that works like 2000s google
paulddraper
Agreed.
You can search apps by their exact name, identifier, anything, and App Store will not find them for day+.
tantalor
Bookmarking this for the next time somebody claims Apple makes great software.
mikestew
Odd, Friendster was the first non-sponsored result for me in the U.S. store.
mschuster91
> I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
App Store search is fucked. Hilariously, Apple is at least non-discriminatory - try searching for any Apple app, and they will also be (at best) in the second slot after "sponsored" crap.
chneu
The android app store is no better. Anytime one searches, 3/4 of the results are sponsored apps/ads. It's so annoying.
vector_spaces
The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.
Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site
If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.
See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"
SamBam
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app.
Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.
Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.
If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.
(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)
ineptech
It also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them. That sounds useful.
dgellow
I’m not convinced that’s the case. A relatively small subset of bad actors can join the network, create new accounts on a second phone, tap (or find a way to fake that process via the API), then eventually use those accounts from bots.
It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated
lopis
There's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.
jdyer9
My thoughts as well, I love this!
Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
Bengalilol
Why "hard to bypass" would be a sufficient thing? It depends on the technology used to connect the two phones. Bypassing this process can range from "easy" to "quite complicated", but it remains possible. Once the security is compromised, the entire network loses its core value since a single interaction is enough to establish a permanent connection.
darkwater
Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.
metabagel
I share vacation photos using Polarsteps. It’s quite nice.
schipperai
100%. The exclusivity of the network is the differentiator here.
munificent
> an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.
You could say the same thing about leaving the house.
Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.
dgellow
> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing
Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO
hbn
I don't see the issue with making a social network that's more focused on real-time, current irl connections. Snapchat has already used a similar model with decaying content to great success.
I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.
moondance
As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.
ghostly_s
> iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) Well that's just because I have no idea how to find it. The "share contact?" prompt when you text a new number accomplishes the same I guess but it would be nice to skip the number part.
kristopherleads
Funnily enough, I only use the phone bumping feature when AirDrop is broken and won't detect I'm literally right next to my spouse.
karel-3d
I have used NameDrop about 4-5 times (in 10-ish years of using iPhone). It's not nothing! But it's also not that much.
spiralcoaster
You're right. I don't think I could continue living if one of my friends died and a I could no longer view their social media profile on a site designed to foster in person connections. I really can't think many things worse than this.
delis-thumbs-7e
You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.
KolmogorovComp
You missed the tongue-in-cheek.
xp84
If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.
rahkiin
Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.
jamespo
I think you meant this snark for reddit?
Elucalidavah
> 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore
That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful.
Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.
skybrian
Perhaps "remember when you met with your friends?"
But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow?
It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.
al_borland
While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort.
skybrian
That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?
resident423
I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.
dgellow
It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely
undefined
mjamesaustin
This looks exactly like what I've been looking for. I love the idea of using phone proximity as the only way to add friends.
I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge.
Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?
collinmcnulty
I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing.
mjamesaustin
What I was describing is a way to quickly onboard a friend who I want to friend, because chances are zero of my friends will have this app yet.
If the connect with friend interface also had a QR code for app download and could trigger a connection between our accounts upon download, that would remove enough friction that I could start recommending this to my friends on the fly.
macintux
> allow Bluetooth
I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.
collinmcnulty
I can't imagine how it would be possible to detect a phone in close proximity without allowing this though
1970-01-01
This reminds me of the (also defunct) Bump app.
chr15m
Here's what I would do.
1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA.
2. Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
3. Save yourself a lot of money by building it on top of the Nostr protocol. Run a relay yourself if you want guaranteed reliability. Run a Blossom server for media. Use email for auth and store people's keys for them if you want a traditional UX. Don't worry about what's on Nostr already, just build your own thing on the protocol.
Let people come and go as they please and don't lock them in. They will love you for it later.
Cool project. Have fun!
JimDabell
> Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).
I’ve worked on a platform for social media apps. When the social network had a native iOS app, a native Android app, and a PWA, users chose iOS about two thirds of the time, Android about a quarter of the time, and PWA about 10% of the time. That’s across all users, including desktop, so the PWA actually had an unfair advantage.
People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs, especially for social media.
postalrat
Could it be you are pushing your native app? Maybe for more control to advertising in your app, tracking, etc. Keep those nasty ad blockers out.
kube-system
It's probably just because social media consumption looks like this today:
https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/07/23/11/newFile-3.jpg
and not like this, anymore:
https://headlineplanet.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/M...
pbasista
> People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs
Such a conclusion cannot reasonably be made from the data you have presented. It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.
undefined
weird-eye-issue
If somebody wouldn't even bother to download an app for a social network they probably wouldn't stick around for very long either
probably_wrong
What about the opposite situation? I'm not installing an app without first having taken a look at what the network has to offer.
weird-eye-issue
Yes, of course some people will feel that way, but also having less friction is not always necessarily a good thing because it requires less of a time investment for the user to get started, so therefore they are actually more likely to just churn. It is a balance
derwiki
Nobody wants to install an app?
danilocesar
I always avoid apps if I can.
But yeah, that comment is a bit disconnected to majority of the population.
derwiki
I’m not saying that I disagree personally, but for most folks, installing an app does not cross any line in the sand
sgt
Granted, there's a lot of crap apps out there. But properly built apps are a world apart from your typical PWA's or web sites (or even really good ones)
Invictus0
[flagged]
albedoa
[flagged]
threecheese
We’re not normies, so take that with a grain of salt. Here’s mine: apps have access to significantly expanded capabilities which has privacy implications. If I can use the browser for a given app, I do it. Amazon for example.
ChrisMarshallNY
As a native app writer, this has been my experience.
Mentioning it here, though, tends to get pushback from folks that write Web apps. They don’t want to admit that native apps have more capabilities than Web apps; even if that’s a bad thing, because of security risks.
ripped_britches
lol I was going to say this too! I think the inverse is true: nobody wants to install a PWA
numpad0
People say PWAs are good as apps now and feels like an app now, personally as ab armchair nobody I doubt the retention rate actually compare, even if the app was literally just a plain WebView.
fc417fc802
Personally I'll only install FOSS apps on my phone and I go out of my way to actively discourage (to varying degrees of success) my relatives from installing arbitrary junk that they surely don't need on their phones.
opan
Same here, if it's on F-Droid I'll install it, otherwise I'm using the mobile site on my browser.
stingraycharles
Yeah that’s a weird comment. I don’t want a PWA. I want a normal app. Users want apps.
retired
I have a handful of 3rd party apps on my phone and none on my computer. Prefer to just use browser.
paulnpace
If it requires Play Store, I will only put it on my work phone.
jgtrosh
After a quick search, there is an NFC web API, but with no general support https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API
dgellow
That’s empirically wrong. All statistics say that people do install apps way more than PWA
postalrat
Do you install a hacker news app?
thepasch
> 1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA.
Misses the point completely. The entire idea is that this enforces in-person meetings, which QR codes do not.
stkdump
You could make the qr code extremely short lived, like 2 seconds or so.
navigate8310
one could video call and scan
Zeebrommer
> You’d have to be specifically watching the domain friendster.com at the right time to find and participate in the auction, or you’d have to actively watch gname.com daily to see this auction.
You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
FinnKuhn
> You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
I looked into this a while ago and I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds of these services and even ones you can host yourself. No idea how well they work though.
dgellow
A domain being for sale can mean a lot of things. Here it meant it was auctioned on a very specific website
randomtoast
> You're telling me there's no "notify me when domain X becomes for sale" service?
I guess in today's age you would just schedule an agent to check the website every day.
ryanjshaw
Geez who did you offend? Half your comments are dead for no obvious reason I can tell. Vouched for you but you may want to reach out to @dang.
Tade0
I think it started here:
fnordian_slip
Wouldn't that be rather inefficient, from a resource perspective?
y42
I can't believe that domain trading is still a thing.. I am sitting on a bunch of "nice" domains; I could never imagine someone actually bought for not even vor 100 bucks... and here we are, 30k?
OK.
Barbing
Wow, the phone tap requirement, love it! And your ethics, the best part.
Constructively, of course (if you care for feedback devolving ramble-y):
Could almost see myself using a web app version of this for kicks. But can’t sign up for another network (though would be happy to link a self hosted project, if I could stumble through setup). Apps don’t feel private (Apple neglects to offer basic firewall/other features), and not sure how someone would look at me trying to get them to register somewhere… maybe the phone tap pitch is enough? (Especially if it’d allow one-tap registration for friends inviting new friends, because the phone bump allowed for some data transfer.)
Anyway, understand self hosting is ostensibly permanently destined to be unpopular but somehow feel if the pitch were “be your own network, tap the phone, use this Friendster infrastructure/instruction set to link your networks”, I’d be more tempted.
Thank you for keeping it not evil!
Barbing
It’s almost unfair for me to say this, still registered on Meta properties… even need them for work… uhg!!! Zuck pls retire to do philanthropy & hire OP
vortegne
Let's not praise a professional domain squatter for his ethics. I don't understand how this guy isn't getting laughed out of the room?
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Apart from this app, I'm confused how proudly this guy presents his sleazy domain-squatting shenanigans. It seems to me, setting this friendster site apart, these people are the parasites of the internet. This whole domain name business is a corrupt stinking pile of crap. Why are we tolerating this? For this friendster app, I think we can be certain, if it has any success, it will become the same crap we already have, given where this dude stands.