Suggestions for starting a social network

[Vasily_1942Red Star Supporter]

April 16th, 2012

Does anyone have any suggestions for free software to use to set up a social network?  I want to make a site that's similar in functionality to Facebook.

[Tanya]

April 18th, 2012

What exactly is the purpose of this site and why do you want to create it? It's not worth trying to create a social network unless you have a very specific audience in mind and there's not an alternative that would work a lot better. If you want to do it for the novelty of it, it's unlikely that anyone would be interested in joining and no one wants to use an inactive social network.

A personal social network probably won't be able to host more then a few thousand active users before hosting costs and technical complexity would start to skyrocket. Video uploads would be out of the question.

The easiest option is Buddypress, which is a plugin for Wordpress and is what we use for our reenacting group so we don't have to require anyone to use Facebook. Even still, it's not that active all things considered.

Any website that requires a userbase is going to have a serious chicken and egg problem. At least with some types of sites, you can work diligently on creating content before you have users, but that doesn't work for social networks. You need to have an audience like a school or something that the network can serve.

When I created this forum, there weren't a huge number of alternatives out there and it was easy to pop up in search results in Google just by having content within the site and we were able to grow early on.

[Vasily_1942Red Star Supporter]

April 19th, 2012

I have been thinking about making an alternative to Facebook, but I could focus it down to a community centered around World War II. I don't expect to have more then a small community going, and a few hundred active users would be a big success as far as I'm concerned.

I'm going to try setting up a site with Buddypress and see how it goes.

How did you attract users to this forum when you started it?

[Tanya]

April 20th, 2012

I doubt that a social network for WWII buffs is going to take off. It's not the right type of site for that. If you started a forum or a wiki and then packaged a social network with it for a sense of community, it might work. I've never pushed mine heavily through the forum, but it doesn't have that many users. I'd start a wiki or forum and build in social features for the community to use and start from there if I wanted to try to build a site like that.

I don't think a generic social network without some type of focus is going to take off unless you get extremely lucky, and even then it's not going to be sustainable. A non commercial one man operation isn't going to be able fund or even moderate very much. People join social networks where their friends are or where other people they want to be with are.