- What is the business model? Subscriptions will not pay for the initial OpEx / CapEx investment. How will investors make a profit?

- How will your company lure people away from the other big platforms that all their friends and coworkers are on? What are the incentives beyond promises of no data collection? Most people no longer accept good-faith promises any more as greedy people have emptied that bucket.

I don't pay for X or any other social network.

Perhaps donations could work instead?

I think subscriptions could work, people pay not to have ads in other media they consume, ive built a prototype platform, that allows users to curate their life in it, part social network, part journal, part support. i want to also build in safety features for children so parents feel safe letting their children online. would love some feedback on the premise.

I can however see this for niches and small groups. Something more akin to old school bulletin board forums. In a sense Metafilter works a bit that way already.

Semi-private social apps that are invite only (like a company's Slack channels) or require discovery (like a game's Discord) have made lots of money and neither of those companies uses ads.

If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to <insert some replacement> then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?

If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?

Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.

Good luck!

I think a great example of a part of a social network that would be good is event organizing. Partiful I believe is attempting to make money in that particular space by offering paid super-user features for higher-volume party promoters and the like.