Thanks Sasha! The magic of new messengers and new communities is that early on, its always a special group of people. There is culture of trust and collaboration. Hopefully, we'll be able to keep this spirit as we grow.
Yes, this is high on our priority list. In general, we'd like to work with every business-in-a-box platform (Coursera for teachers, Shopify for sellers, Spotify for musicians, etc.) to help their creators run customer/follower/fan communities.
Thanks! Openland is almost intentionally very close to FB Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram in its user experience. We want to make it super familiar and easy to participate for everyday people who join for access to special communities and people we have on the platform.
Today, our biggest and most distinct advantages are on the organizer side. Automation and integrations are key for larger organizations and individual leaders to launch and operate their communities. With Openland there will be more communities in the world.
This tells me that you’re going to have a huge discoverability problem. People won’t know which group chats to join, unless they are explicitly invited. If you’re going to replace FB Messenger, then you have to have an established community that is the size of FB. Or you have to have a really strong network effect that will rapidly build the size of your community to that range.
Things that I hate about Discord are that it forces me to have just one global account name across all servers, and one icon. Sure, once I join a server, I can change my nickname there, but I still can’t change my icon. But names (and nicknames) aren’t globally appropriate or useful. Nor are icons.
But at least Discord servers have public forums, some of which might be announce-only, others might be discussion oriented, and then there might be private forums that are only available to certain people with a particular tag. It doesn’t sound like your service is going to have any of this.
Thanks! Indeed, we strive for simplicity. It's still too hard for people and organizations to start a chat group or multi-chat community. More to be done here with community templates, organizer resources, and organizer onboarding.
Very interesting! We actually use the system fonts. I.e. Openland is set in San Francisco on Mac/iOS, Roboto on Android, and Calibri on Windows. We do this to minimize distraction of an unusual font.
On column width, I am curious, what device and browser size have you used? Many of our users use the desktop version and resize it to the proportions they like.
Readability is a big priority for us, we'll keep working to make it better across all devices. Yes, the web version is only resizable with the browser itself. For more control over the app dimensions, consider using Openland for Windows.
The quality of the demo is very impressive. I can imagine a lot of use cases, particularly in mobile apps. People want to consume more content from Apple Air Pods. E.g. this can be a way to get your Twitter feed and Hacker News read to you while running in the gym.
We also leveraging the ICHRA, but Savvy works a little differently.
Instead of a reimbursement-based approach, where employees pay insurance premiums themselves and submit them for reimbursement (like a business expense), we manage the payments for employees. This means the insurance bill is paid by the employer and any extra employee contribution is deducted from payroll. We do it this way so that the employee contribution is also tax-free.
We are also investing heavily in helping employees find the right plan. Behind the scenes our brokers are recommending plans for every employee, and we are building out tools that help employees do things like find a plan with a specific doctor or hospital in network.
Hacker News helps a large group of like-minded people to collectively find and curate best content to consume. It combines algorithmic and human approach in a unique way. Somewhat surprisingly, this model was rarely replicated elsewhere.
Perhaps more curation and digest solutions will be soon built for large chat networks on Discord, Slack, and Telegram. I haven't seen any good curation and digest solutions for those networks yet.
IMO the reason HN works is because the majority here have the platform's best interests at heart and curate the content based on what would be appropriate for the site instead of just their personal opinions.
There aren't these kinds of incentives (nor clear rules as to what content is considered on or off topic) on any mainstream social networks, and the operators themselves would rather have an disorganised army of idiots wasting time spamming random crap (and clicking on ads) rather than having a community centred around a set of guidelines and a common goal. Like if I sign up on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram today there isn't a FAQ post to let me know what's the objective of the platform, what content should I post, etc. Worse, I can isolate myself in echo-chambers by following the wrong accounts (which the platform will encourage by recommending more accounts like those) and this is how you end up with misinformation, etc.
See also Twitter; it used to be for mostly tech people due to the relative complexity and unwritten rules of the platform acting as a gatekeeper preventing idiots from coming in. If you put in the time to learn and understand what the platform is about and go through those barriers then there's a good chance you'd be a productive member of the network, so overall it self-regulated quite well. Unfortunately, these users are also the least likely to click on cancer aka ads, and since big tech is allergic to letting people actually pay for a service they'd rather dumb down the platform and open the floodgates and the cesspool that is today's Twitter is the (predictable) result.
Love your analysis. That's why I am so bullish on "premium social" trend. I think 2020 is the year when the smartest users will begin pay for their social networks, messengers, and media curation services. Already many signals for this, including The Information, Stratechery, and Substack (YC W18).
We guarantee easy export for all organizers. If something goes wrong or you simply want to move elsewhere, we will not keep you locked in.