I feel like in a lot of ways, app.net was ahead of it’s time. It’s whole goal was to build a “social backbone”. A social account and network of linked users. On top of that backbone you could build out services, and all your friends were already there. In a lot of ways, it did what the fediverse is trying to do with Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and activitypub in general.
I remember they started with a Twitter clone, but a clone for Vine, and Instagram soon appeared. It was wonderful while it existed.
In some ways, I think what I am trying to do with communick is very similar. I am just being very careful to avoid the things that (IMHO) killed them.
they wanted to charge $99/year for access. From everyone. That is completely unrealistic. My basic access costs $10/year, and it can cost even less if you join as a group.
they went the YC route. Got money, and with it the responsibility to grow at all costs. I just want to build something that can be sustainable and that can give me the resources to keep working on interesting open source projects.
I took a peek, and it looks great!