Email re-skinned as a social network

With recent revelations about Facebook’s failure to secure users’ private data, there has been an understandable surge in ideas to replace it. Here I outline mine:

Consider a social network that uses email as its communications protocol and regular mail servers as the “cloud”. There is no “platform”, but an app which is basically a re-skinned mail client with certain features disabled or abstracted. There is no advertising.

Here is a very crude representation:

An email based social media app

• You download the app and enter your email credentials
• You add a profile picture, which the app will use to create a Gravatar, and some personal info, which the app will save locally as a vCard
• The app generates a key pair for you and stores it locally
• You enter the email address of a friend and send a connection request
• The app sends this request as a specially formatted email containing your vCard, Gravatar and public key
• If the friend already has the app, it appears there as a connection request. If not, it is shown in his regular email client as an invitation to download the app
• Your friend accepts the connection request
• His app stores your public key and vCard locally
• His app sends an acknowledgement to you as another specially formatted email, containing the friend’s public key, vCard and Gravatar
• Your app stores this data locally. You’re now connected
• If you want, you can add him to a local contact group, just like with an email client
• To share a new post, you insert text/media as you do with any social network
• But unlike other networks, you need to explicitly select your audience. There is no “public”
• Under the hood, this basically composes a new digitally signed email for each of the contacts
• The email is again specially formatted to be digested and rendered by the app
• If you use your regular email address for the app, you need to create a filter in your regular email client to prevent app-generated emails from clogging your inbox
• Or, you can setup a dedicated email address, or your own mail server
• There is no BCC. All recipients know who the other recipients are
• You cannot send anything to people you’re not connected to
• Only you can add recipients to your post. Recipients can only reply/reply-all
• Replies will appear as comments
• Data retention is identical to emails — delete from server or delete from local device as you see fit

Benefits should be self-explanatory. I’m sure there are holes in this concept. Please feel free to point them out.

Email re-skinned as a social network was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.