Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening

It's an interesting idea, but if it's only open at a convenient time for a particular group, it's going to lack diverse and worldwide perspectives, and those are important for building a welcoming ecosystem. I doubt giving each timezone its own 3 hours would work, but perhaps rotating the 3 hours each day so that it's anchored on a different timezone would encourage that diversity of content and perhaps even encourage creating connections across timezones.

That said, if you've had success with it in a friend group, perhaps that suggests it's a nice mechanism for a group chat app, rather than for a public social media site?

I kind of like the idea of a regional social media app which literally doesn’t work in other parts of the world. It makes the space a little more special than something trying to reach everyone IMO

People have completely lost sight of the importance of small forums.

Forums, perhaps. But small group chats (which I suppose are technically "dark") are the bedrock of the current internet writ large and where most of the content that filters up to places like Twitter comes from.

You're absolutely right and this is something I've studied and thought about quite a lot. The dark aspect of group chats does fundamentally separate them from forums, which had the benefit of searchability, permanence and topic longevity.

At least we will benefit from what forums are left in the form of model training data. People give LLMs a lot of shit, but it's possible one day that a language model ends up becoming a go-to oracle of future archeologists studying the present day.

Sometimes it's easy to take for granted how historic the current times are, and how interested people will be in the minuet and institutional knowledge which few bother to expend considerable resources preserving.