Can Primfeed Succeed Flickr? I Talk With Luke Rowley, Creator of the Upcoming Social Network for Second Life Avatars

With continued reports that Second Life content creators on Flickr are being banned or penalized for various infractions -- including top creator Teal Aurelia, who tells me "they keep banning accounts on really minor/subjective Terms of Service violations" -- I've reached out to Flickr's CEO for a response.

Another response to all this is Primfeed, a new social media service for Second Life users, set to launch next month.

It's a project by Luke Rowley, whose SL services EasyBloggers and EasySubscribers are already popular with Second Life content creators. He was originally planning to launch an SL-focused social media platform in 2025.

But the recent Flickr fracas stepped up that schedule.

"I’ve seen more and more people complaining about Flickr and their policies, people getting suspended etc," as he puts it to me. "I’ve always felt [we were] missing something 100% dedicated to Second Life. Sometime I just wanted to browse SL content, and not having my feed filled with ads and suggested posts like Facebook."

Thousands of SLers have already expressed interest, either by responding to his project proposal in a Google form, on his Facebook feed, or by visits to the Primfeed site itself.

But creating and sustaining an image-heavy social media platform is no easy task, usually demanding many developers and powerful, well-financed back-end architecture. Can Primfeed do that? Read on to find out.

Along with his work as an SL scripter for the past 12 years, Luke says he's been developing websites professionally for over six. He believes he can bring in enough paying subscribers to cover Primfeed's server costs.

"I've run a survey to the community to see if they are willing to pay, and if so, how many people etc," he tells me. "From the stats I get, and the calculation I made, these subscriptions will be enough for Primfeed to be sustainable. The number of paid subscribers will be enough to pay for the free users."

A couple unique advantages he has over Flickr: His other SL service EasyBloggers already has 2000 registered users, and even more key, Primfeed subscriptions can be paid directly to him through Linden Dollars. (He may integrate credit card payments later.)

"Trust me," Luke puts it, "if it wasn't worth it, for me or the users, I wouldn't have started to work on it right away."

One other advantage Luke has over Flickr: Teal Aurelia herself has joined Primfeed as a beta tester and influencer.

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Comments

[Luther Weymann]

Four years ago, my photos started disappearing after receiving three messages from Flickr about my 500+ product photos and how I was not allowed to have any links. I called a former employee who had worked for Flickr recently and was now at Facebook. He said it was simple: Flickr management does not like all the non-real-world pictures and wants Flickr to be a real-life photography site. That was four years ago. I removed all my photos and closed my Flickr account. This has been going on for a long time with Flickr, and with the growth of SL pics on Flickr, they are just picking up the pace of getting SL stuff off of Flickr.

[Maddy]

I think the previous comment summed up the core issue. Flickr wants to live in the past with a retrograde website that supports only 20th Century forms of photographic art. And it's also bought into the unethical business model where it doxxes users and sells that information to advertisers. That there are other business models that don't require everyone pay but that also don't doxx users and Flickr and other big tech companies refuse to adopt them tells you what kind of people run these giant corporations. Of course, people don't push back on it, either, so there's plenty of blame to go around. But as a result, there are no extant happy solutions for people at present; only the less awful. What a joyless dystopia this creates.

[Whine]

People that know the rules about "no commercial activity on a free account" and still whine about Flickr deleting their account.... you come off cheap.

[SHERLYNDREA]

What was the response from the CEO of FLickr?

[Siobhan Dreadlow]

I figured out my account had been suspended when I discovered no one could see my content -- three MONTHS after I started paying for Pro, and found out they'd suspended my account more than a year prior.

I canceled my pro subscription, downloaded all my photos and demanded a refund of all fees paid since the beginning of this year -- which after they tried to get me to stick around with "60 days free" and I insisted they escalate to a superior they ultimately refunded.

I'll move to primfeed and happy to do it.

Flickr treats SL residents poorly and I'm disgusted with them.