Any thoughts about setting up an alternative to the US-based Social Media platforms?? Especially Twitter.

Realize it's a daunting task, but somebody needs to do it ASAP. And got a feeling many of us would actively and enthusiastically promote ANY alternative to the US-based monsters and their State Dept censors.

*Yes, looked at Parler, Gab, & a bunch of others, but nothing looks viable .. yet.

I absolutely oppose this idea. One of the reasons I ditched my gmail account was the difficulty in removing unwelcome chats once they are attached to a hang out. People can contact you through the chat function without your consent. You have no opportunity to accept or reject the chat. No matter how often you delete them they keep returning. If you go on the net and do a search you will see how many people have problems with chat hang outs. Also, you can hide but you can't delete the chat function from gmail because it's built into the architecture of the program. So please Protonmail, don't do it.

I would rather keep social features AWAY from Proton.
I am personally looking for a strong concept of privacy.

Please continue focusing on your fantastic with on Protonmail/VPN. It is a breath of fresh air for this 'Net old-timer. Feature-creep would only devalue what you have accomplished. Now that Protonmail is getting positive attention all around (featured on Steve Gibson's podcast as well), it would be a shame to become lost in the average crowd. No one needs yet another social network. Leave that to other insecure companies please. Thank you!

I did head this Idea for a some time and I was thinking to create the system(I am a Software developer). The problem was how to take the users away from the "social networks" which abuse users data.
The easy way was to use the email as basis with zero knowledge system. The email is used as main entity to transfer the Information.
Adding few flags and values will allow to be emulated Social network and chat.
Example:
Person 1 shares status/image with other users using their emails.
The system filters the emails by tags if it is coming from the social like part or just pure email.
If has social tag, all users which get the email can see it under social messages and the image is shown bellow the message.
Person 2 responses to the message of the Person 1 with comment - a new Email is sent with to the Person 1 - based on the sharing Settings Persons 1 sends the content to the Persons which received the first Message. Using Some ID in the email to know which email is response to which message and to build a tree structure for the messages.
Person 2 or Person 1 now want to remove the message of Person 2. The System will send email to the users which contains the ID of the EMail to be removed with Flag to be deleted.
The Social Emails are never shown to the user in Inbox but only in another Box/Folder called Social.
The Same Options can be used for chat functionality. The most of the functionality already exists and implementing few flags with ID and filtering for the message should be not so time consuming.

The last thing anyone needs is yet another social network. Let PM just be email, please.

Hello,

Maybe but .....first i think we all want Protonmail for privacy. Social Features will break this fragile concept.
I think it's not a good idea for the moment (personal opinion)