I think this proposal points at an interesting issue that I see crop up often on sites like HN. It goes (I think) like this: 1) "I care deeply about what I perceive to be a problem." 2) Extrapolates onto some large critical mass of people, 3) That critical mass of people does not actually agree with the problem statement in any way, 4) Build a solution, never gets meaningful traction, misdiagnoses the root cause of the failure.

I'm not saying this to dump on this idea. Rather, I think it is a meaningful bias that all humans are vulnerable too. But I do think that filter bubbles amplify whatever this bias is to a powerful degree. If you are surrounded by people who are obsessed with privacy, it seems like everyone is inflamed by the economic model of social networks. But, outside the small filter bubble, most other people don't care at all or actually think its a great model.

Having said all of that, maybe a way to test whether you are experiencing this bias is to interview or collect information from as close to a random sample of social media users as possible. The more random the better. If you find yourself talking to people in SF/Seattle or people in the tech industry, that's a sure sign you have a bad sample. When you talk to them, don't ask leading questions that will bias them. Try to understand what their unbiased views on the problems (if any) are with social networks. Maybe you ask them what their best friend thinks so as to try to sidestep preference falsification. If you discover a consistent problem, maybe you're onto something. But then, you're still up against a world saturated with social networks, and convincing people to pay for something they get for free will be very, very hard. I think, ultimately, the only way you'll discover whether the problems you may have found are really important or not is if you can convince anyone to pay you. I suspect it will be a Sisyphean endeavor.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

That isn't being snarky, it is the question you need to answer. Why would people join it? What problem are you solving for them? Why are celebrities and influencers on those platforms to begin with?

When you can detail out those answers, those answers tell you what you need to do to launch. You have to match the table stakes of existing platforms, which means you need to know not only what those are, but why they are important to the userbase.

I suspect you'll find that your drive for privacy-first is going to be well-received in theory, but not a match for why people join such platforms. But you'll need to do the research to figure out such things.

Your motivation is purely revenue. What would the user's motivation be to add yet another thing they have to keep up to date on? What can any users you do get use to convince their circle of humans to also join?

Without massive user counts or revenue share with celebs or influencers what incentive would they have to join?

How are you going to pay for bandwidth and storage of videos/images with no revenue? Like do you have a nest egg/run rate saved to fund this social network for a year or two?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed