
Show HN: Thread – Ad-free social networking and iMessage alternative - danfang
https://get.thread-app.com
======
danfang
Hey HN,

I'm Daniel, founder of Thread.

I started Thread two months ago because I believe current social media and
social networks are built in a way that harms our ability to meaningfully
connect with one another. They're highly addictive, superficial, and socially
isolating. They also run a reputation of violating user privacy and selling it
to third parties.

I strongly believe in ad-free, private social networking as an alternative.
It's all about building and maintaining relationships with the people closest
to you. If this sounds interesting, please try out the app! It's still very
early, beta software.

On pricing: I think advertising is out of the question. It's a strong
misalignment of incentives in trying to deliver long term value for end users.
I have some ideas here, but the most obvious thing that comes to mind is a
subscription based service (say ~$10/year).

I would love to hear your feedback (questions, comments, suggestions) on what
I'm building.

Reach out to me personally at daniel@thread-app.com.

~~~
lucky_cloud
[https://get.thread-app.com/privacy-policy/](https://get.thread-
app.com/privacy-policy/)

We may disclose personal information to: ... third parties, including agents
or sub-contractors, who assist us in providing information, products, services
or direct marketing to you.

There's no marketing in iMessage, certainly not based on the things I type
into iMessage.

Also, to be clear, "marketing" is advertising. You say "ad-free" but then you
give yourself the right to advertise.

There's also nothing I can find about end-to-end encryption, which is one of
the best features of iMessage. I almost exclusively use iMessage because I
know Apple isn't spying on me. When friends message me on Instagram, I reply
in iMessage.

~~~
danfang
Founder here.

This is great feedback. My interpretation of the clause is that we can use
services like Mailchimp to send you marketing materials for when we release
new products and features. These would be strictly opt-in.

I'm not a legal expert, but I will try to come up with a policy that more
clearly expresses that you will NOT receive marketing about third-party
services and our only usage of these services would be to update you all on
our new product offerings.

We're considering offering E2E encryption, but we believe that we can deliver
a ton of value by allowing users to search through their messages and for us
to efficiently organize and categorize your content. I think there is a middle
ground where we can encrypt non-pertinent data, but still preserve metadata so
we can provide some intelligence on top of the content you choose to share on
the platform.

~~~
mentalpiracy
> I'm not a legal expert, but I will try to come up with a policy that more
> clearly expresses that you will NOT receive marketing about third-party
> services and our only usage of these services would be to update you all on
> our new product offerings.

You do not need to be a legal expert to state this in your policy in plain
language.

Examples:

"We will collect your contact information for the purpose of updating you
about this product."

"We will not collect analytic data."

"If this policy changes, you will be notified 60 days before data collection
begins."

You do not need to predicate openness and honesty on legal expertise.

~~~
danfang
Fixed.

It now reads: "We may disclose personal information to: third parties,
including agents or sub-contractors, who assist us in sending direct marketing
about our new products and features"

What I meant about legal expertise is that we don't want to be in violation of
our privacy policy if we decide to use tools to understand our users better,
or if we decide to email users about new products and features. Which is why I
left some room in the privacy policy to enable such features.

~~~
cmroanirgo
> _We may disclose personal information_

This alone will be enough of a deal breaker for privacy nuts, such as myself.
If I'm going to use your service, you just champion privacy. This means no
marketing gimmicks.

Sorry. For me this comes no way close to being an iMessage alternative. Even
if you become a privacy champion, you still need to expect us to trust your
servers, which is a tricky thing without end to end encryption.

Maybe an alternate model is to get funding from big corporate sponsorship and
have a distributed network that could be hosted on our own droplets (using
open source, of course). You can then have a paid hosted saas for those not
technically ready to self host. Until there's a solution out there that does
just that, I'm very unlikely to bite.

~~~
danfang
Yeah - I don't see Thread as the right product for privacy nuts, as you refer
to yourself. There are better services for that, like Signal.

I imagine Thread as a company that focuses more on delivering products that
allow people to build more meaningful relationships and connections in a way
that benefits their long term mental/social health. I believe we can do that
in a way that delivers an 80/20 on privacy too, by not using targeted
advertising, and having 0 incentives to sell your data.

If you're not willing to trust our servers, I don't think the product is right
for you. Hopefully we build trust as a company that does right by our users in
the long run, unlike what I'm seeing from companies today.

------
hprotagonist
Some blunt questions for you:

iMessage doesn't have ads (and honestly i cannot see it ever changing), but it
does have one hell of an ecosystem. Why is yours better?

How do you propose to enter a very crowded space and get enough users to pay
you keep the lights on when every alternative is free?

If you're actually a WhatsApp alternative instead of an iMessage alternative,
why are you better than Signal? It's free, and they're a nonprofit with a
warchest and really, truly no incentive to keep any metadata about you at all.

~~~
danfang
1\. We're not restricted to the Apple ecosystem. A majority of the world's
users are on Android. There's a lot of evidence that the exclusivity of
iMessage is causing anxiety and stress in certain social circles:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715188)

2\. We plan to offer a very different kind of product than "simple secure
messaging" (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram). We want to truly capture meaningful,
social interactions beyond just quick messages. I want to build a service that
better ties in event planning, payment splitting, and location sharing into
your groups. An experience like Google photos where you can build shared
albums in your groups. One where sharing music and videos feels natural and
you can have "shared" experiences. We plan to integrate with a ton of third
parties to offer intelligence on top of your messages (restaurant ratings,
flight tracking, etc).

3\. We want to build a better platform on top of messaging. Plugins and bots
are pretty useless right now. We think we can offer apps and services that
live in your conversations in really meaningful ways. It will be strictly opt-
in, so users are choosing which services they want to integrate with.

We're starting with messaging because that's the starting point for meaningful
group interactions, but I don't see anyone else in the space filling the gap
for the things I mentioned.

~~~
oarsinsync
> We plan to integrate with a ton of third parties to offer intelligence on
> top of your messages

You need to be _real_ careful about how you do this, and be mindful of this
not becoming a privacy leaking side channel

~~~
giancarlostoro
I agree, everyone loves giphy, and talking to bots... or using custom Slack /
Discord commands, but those are opt-in and predictable. Anything beyond that
would be dangerous.

------
rwz
I like the effort, but honestly there's tons of apps that are cross-platform,
free, and can do everything imessages can, but better. Telegram is just one
example.

I see adoption as a biggest problem. I personally tried to migrate to Telegram
and failed to convince even my own wife to give it a try, since imessages work
for her and all her friends are there and why bother.

~~~
sdan
Definitely the biggest problem is adoption.

My friends/coworkers aren't just going to jump onto another app just for a
cooler feature. We use Messenger and everything is just fine. If we need to we
can use Venmo/Calendar invite and that's it.

------
kitsunesoba
Looks interesting. I see there’s web for desktop use, but have you considered
bringing the iOS app to Mac with Catalyst?

~~~
danfang
We'd probably go more cross platform with something like Electron. It makes
sense given our heavy React stack.

------
jamesgeck0
> Thread works seamlessly on iOS, Android, and web browsers. We're not a
> walled garden.

There isn't an API, data export, or a way to spin up my own Thread server.
Thread is a walled garden.

Additionally, I can't find a way to delete my account.

~~~
danfang
Shoot me an email at daniel@thread-app.com with your account details and we'll
get your account deleted.

I don't believe average users gain much from federated, distributed,
decentralized services (after you factor in the cost and limitations of such
systems), but we'll consider it if there's a lot of demand.

There's a long road ahead of building trust with users, but I think if we're
intentional about being the most open, transparent social networking company,
we can build that trust with our actions and track record.

------
emptysongglass
I appreciate the effort but as a person who has quit all social media, these
more intimate, private spaces are served by messengers. For me, specifically,
it's Telegram and it does an absolutely bang up job of it.

You're going to be outstripped in sheer features here to say nothing of
stickers, round videos, the upcoming transaction layer in the TON, bots for
pretty much everything, so on and so forth.

Social media is just a name for "broadcast widely", which has never been my
interest. Messengers are that smaller scale.

~~~
danfang
Thanks for your input. I've never been really satisfied with the level of
interaction of messengers. They usually end up as a firehose of short
messages, where everything meaningful and important is lost in the noise. It's
good for quick notifications, for sure.

What I'm imagining, for the types of things that I like to do with friends and
family, is more oriented around long term social interactions. This means
being able to plan and view events, view and split payments, and build a
persistent group album -- to start. When I'm sharing videos, music, or
recommendations, I don't want it to get lost as soon as it reaches the top of
the screen.

This is where messaging falls short and I believe it can be supplemented by a
lot of the features of traditional social networks.

~~~
criddell
Did you ever use the short lived social network site from Microsoft (I think)?
It was designed as a room that people shared and you could post messages and
photos and play music that everybody would hear.

I don't remember the name, but I think it had a number in it.

~~~
vuln
Was it Google Wave?

[https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en](https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en)

------
davefp
What's the reasoning for tying my account to a phone number? Personally it's a
huge turn-off for me.

~~~
danfang
1\. If you need to reset your pw at any point, we need either your email or
phone number. We don't ask for your email. A phone number is most likely tied
to a real person.

2\. It's a unique identifier that allows you to add your existing contacts
more easily. It's much more convenient than trying to figure out the usernames
of all your friends and family.

3\. It's harder to automate creation of users by requiring a valid phone
number, versus usernames (and potentially even email).

------
ngrilly
On the surface, it looks similar to Telegram groups. What are the differences?

------
nikolay
Isn't Facebook starting a communication product called Thread?

------
LeoPanthera
Do you have stickers?

Furries aren't going to touch your service without stickers and they seem to
be running the internet these days.

