How do I build a new social network?

You can't. Your best bet is to joint the fediverse so you can interoperate with existing networks, like Mastodon.

> too much moderation

> rampant bot abuse

You can't solve the bot problem without thorough, labor-intensive moderation. These two of your goals are at odds with each other.

I will also say that almost 100% of the value of reddit is the moderation. After Musk eviscerated Twitter's moderation, it became more of a cesspit and people have been leaving for better-moderated networks.

> I want to make sure all political content is restricted or super duper limited

How are you going to do this without moderation?

What's your definition is political? Is discussing climate change political? What about health care?

If filtering certain topics or moderating a social network were a simple problem, bigger companies (like Meta) would've solved it without armies of human moderators.

Which also begs the question: how would you keep CSAM off your network?

Have a goal in mind. A social network is a tool to an end. What is the end?

I have found several use cases all trying to go on at the same time.

1. People with important group communications needing a large audience; i.e. scientists sharing research, organizations needing to contact people, special interest groups like Ham Radio (cuz they can't broadcast on their gear), photographers, musicians and so on.

2. Hot news feeds. These were added not to share news, but to lock people in with echo chamber news.

3. People simply wanting to communicate privately with friends and family and so on.

4. Local information of interest and need. Some is quite urgent, as in evacuation alerts; Some is important, like road closures and events, and some is caustic bullshit as in community gossip and flame wars. And LOCAL advertising can actually be useful and not just the "sports talk radio" carpet-bombing of tax attorneys, divorce lawyers, dick stiffeners, and house flippers.

5. Politics. I find that this is best in affinity groups that are heavily moderated. Trolls and bots gonna troll.

6. Probably more.

The more you address, the more diluted the product.

And the money model?

> dont like how political platforms like reddit has become > I want it to be limited to North America only

I obviously don't know your reasoning but IMO you're already going political

I have the same urges.

You need to carefully consider what you truly want and the realities surrounding those desires. How large do you envision this social network becoming? Do you aspire to be the next Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters?

Large social networks need to grow to survive, and growth requires funding.

Are you pursuing a commercial venture or a non-profit one?

If it's commercial, you will likely need to seek external investors. They will expect a return on their investment and will exert influence -- often in the form of ad revenue or otherwise increasing costs to your end users. It almost always ends this way, unless you stay a small bootstrapper.

If it's non-profit, you will still need to secure funding through various fundraisers and donations.

It would help to brainstorm (to yourself, at least) what you want to accomplish in lucid detail. This post is not it.

Imagine going to a dinner party where politics was not allowed to be discussed. After a few wines, people would break the rule. People in social settings enjoy talking politics, even if it means animated debate.

Politics is essentially about finding the best way to improve society by fixing issues or proposing new ideas. Isn't it? If so, perhaps it's specific conduct you want restricted, not politics. After all, bad conduct can happen when talking about any topic.

> The internet that I grew up with wasnt this political or bombareded with political news and such, I feel like this is really bad for peoples mental health and would like to help them.

maybe we had different internet (I grew up in the USA), but I remember a lot of shock porn/sites. I remember 4chan posting truly horrific content. I remember "prank" videos. I remember revenge porn. I'm kinda glad the internet has cleaned up a lot.

How do you define success? This little website seems to be a great example of having clear guidelines and enforcing them.

I think what we need is something that wouldn’t replace online content but would add a new layer, an alternative for those who want more real-world interaction… and maybe even for those who don’t realize they’d enjoy it yet, a new way of ditributing content is what i expect.

The first thing is to check if a social network already exists that meets your needs such as a closed group using Telegram.

I picked the first search result...

https://www.jploft.com/blog/best-social-media-apps

All you have to do is simply solve the problem of moderation and bots

You can set up a Mastodon instance, choose your method to filter who can register and choose whether it will federate with other instances.

Encourage people to go offline more.

From your comment here, you clearly have a strong idea about what you want to see, so stop pretending to be offended by strong moderation. Just stick to making a forum with a niche that you like. That way you can own it and ban whoever is making trouble for you.

Am I the only one that gets an icky feeling when I see things like “I am so tired of all this political stuff, I want to filter it out”?

All the political news you don’t like is a symptom of the toxic society we’ve built. Maybe we should be making new social networks that bring people together fix the root problem, not ignore it because it’s harshing the vibe.

I'd help you build it if you hire me.

By definition, building a social network requires building something for other people.

There’s nothing wrong building something just for yourself.

But “you can’t build an airplane out of bricks.”

Good luck.

Bluesky has an algorithmic feed even though people think it doesn't.

I am annoyed by emotionally negative political content on Mastodon and had to make a number of rules (no "fascist", "republican", "Trump", ...) to make it tolerable.

I found Bluesky's algorithmic feed eliminated about 75% of emotionally negative content and thought it was a good feed without any rules (though I was being careful who I follow.) Then the inauguration happened and there was a huge exodus of people from X and the feed either got overwhelmed with them or they were deliberately giving activists and journalists a lot of visibility so they build up followers quickly.

I've been wanting to make a "negative people" filter to make it easier to choose people to follow, the idea is to make a ModernBERT + LSTM classifier which I think will outperform my miniLM + pooling + SVM classifier. I need something that can look at images and detect "text in images" such as screenshots and image memes to block those too.

So from my viewpoint people can post what they want, but I won't read it. Probably Threads is using some technology like this to suppress politics and negativity in general.

To tell if something is true you need to make a god. Politics and negativity aren't quite the same thing, but they are fellow travelers.