As Richard DiBona scrolled through his Facebook app’s endless stream of political takes, pet videos, and memes last summer, his nine-year-old son approached him, full of questions.
“What are you looking at?” his son asked.
“Facebook,” DiBona responded.
“Do you like it?”
“Not really.”
“Then why do you look at it?”
In that moment Post With Me, a new social media platform developed by DiBona and his wife Kara Peterson, was born.
Post With Me is a social network specifically designed to be unlike some of the world’s most popular. The site was created to give people a sense of community and civility that DiBona and Peterson feel most social media platforms have abandoned. Users can create posts with photos and text on any topic they want, from sports to travel. They are then grouped together based on topic and open to the world.
All posts on the site are completely public and free of word count constraints. Post With Me eschews any concept similar to Facebook’s friend list or Twitter’s follower count. The amount of exposure a post gets is not reliant on the number of followers one has. Finally, Post With Me collects the bare minimum amount of information about its users. All one needs to create an account is an email address.
Another of Post With Me’s unique traits is that it is completely self-funded.
“We have no investors, purposefully,” Peterson said. “Funding changes how you can grow and what you can do… You have to be careful that the people investing in you are not just looking to monetize the user content.”
Peterson and DiBona are not opposed to seeking outside funding in the future, but are focused on growing the site and creating a welcoming, healthy environment for users now.
“We’re at a stage now where we’re nurturing this thing. We just want to let it be the best thing it can be for the users,” Peterson said.
The two are adamant about maintaining a polite, inclusive environment. Recently, they banned a cartoonist from the site after he repeatedly tried to post content with racist overtones, Peterson said. The couple hopes to foster a community that is not afraid to disagree with one another, but does so in a thoughtful, productive way.
“We just aren’t going to tolerate that. It’s not going to be allowed, period,” Peterson said.
After that first conversation with his son, DiBona and Peterson started work on Post With Me as a side project. The couple maintained their full-time jobs and brought their professional expertise to the new site. A Wayfair alum, DiBona is a software engineer who handles the site’s code, while Peterson brings her skills as a marketing professional to help promote their product. By the end of March, Post With Me was live. While the site still has under 1,000 users, the duo is confident it will continue to grow.
“We have a bunch of people who really like the site and give us good feedback, so we’re encouraged by that,” DiBona said.
The Post With Me team is currently working on implementing a new feature that will allow users to customize their personal pages. They anticipate this will help grow the user participation, as currently most users browse the posts of others without contributing themselves.
“There’s no question that getting people to try a new social site is a challenge.” Peterson said. “Hopefully there really is a market for people who want to have civil and healthy experiences. Time will tell how many people really want to get rid of the toxicity in their social media lives."
