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"

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SamBam 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	jdyer9 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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__d 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.

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Elucalidavah 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> '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.

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jasonkester 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you.

For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.

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spiralcoaster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	xp84 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.

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skybrian 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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al_borland 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

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skybrian 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?

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al_borland 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?

	▲	skybrian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles. But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted? And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?

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resident423 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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incompatible 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does it work? Bluetooth?

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paulnpace 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.

It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.

	▲	card_zero 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Much bullying potential. "You're dead to us" ...