OP, you should charge users a small amount ($24-50 a year), after a trial period. Keep it simple, free of ads and keep the timeline algorithm free.
I’m sure there are many who would love something like this and be willing to pay enough to cover costs and maybe generate a full time income for you. Good luck!!
I wouldn’t pay that much for what this is. I’m sure most of my friends wouldn’t. It’s a neat enough idea that I’d try the free tier, but it doesn’t offer anything compelling enough to make me want to pay for it. I’m not trying to be mean or dismissive; it’s a genuinely cool experiment, and I’d honestly love to see a social network where people actually said longer substantive things rather than low-effort shitposts (or, more and more, just sharing somebody else’s low-effort shitposts).
I don’t like the idea that people can’t see my earlier writings. That’s important to me, especially if I don’t share stuff often and I put effort into it. I don’t see the benefit in hiding that from my friends.
What I’m looking for these days is actual community, conversation, and connection. I think the effortless posting on Facebook/Twitter encourages kneejerk garbage (and blogs, sadly, have fallen into decline) so I really like the more “slow down and make something meaningful” philosophy here. If you can turn that into an actual community—one that offers something Reddit doesn’t—I’d pay for that.
IMO, building a social network is quite difficult nowadays because you can't monetize it right away. So you either have to bootstrap as a side project and build a community for years or getting paid by VC money early on.
We tried something similar [1] a few years ago. The limit is 5 posts per day. Our approach was minimalistic in a sense as you could post links only and no text, pictures, or videos.
We named it Turtle, symbolizing the opposite of the chatty twitter bird. It wasn't so clever from an SEO point of view though.
If target userbase is HN like crowd, charging a small fee is fine. However, I feel this model won't be scalable to general public. Hybrid model (make payments or see ads) might also be worth exploring.
I’m sure there are many who would love something like this and be willing to pay enough to cover costs and maybe generate a full time income for you. Good luck!!