Well it sounds like what you guys really want is my SN

Like I said before though, SN's are tough... hard to get a critical mass of people unless you're creating a group on an already existing network.

I hate to discourage something you enjoy doing, but there is this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop

I still think it might be good to basically leverage someone else's infrastructure and start building a group of people discussing and sharing things about gaming on it. There's many ways to do that. You could do the Diaspora pod thing to get a full social network going without having to build it from scratch, and this way it would be able to interact with the other pods on the network. We could create a Cooperative blog on something like Tumblr, where you could have all of the oldbies around the forum put posts into a queue, and have 2-3 of them get posted per day to the blog for discussion, make it more like a real game news site. There's tons of options out there without building a whole site for it.

Yeah SNs are tough - arguably the toughest you could attempt doing, even Google's mite has amounted to nothing but a blip on FB or Twitter.

But I do like a challenge plus, my main interest is social sites - and all social sites are under thread from FB now ...so I don't really have much choice :/

Maybe I'll change my mind after doing the first two - but never say never

You're absolutely right that they're all under threat. It's an interesting problem. My main reason for bringing up Diaspora is that it's essentially designed to be a distributed version of FB. The hard part is already done, and you can add to your copy of the program to make your own unique version, or you could contribute it to the project and improve it for all of the people using it, and you wouldn't be building the SN alone, but you would have control over your little corner of it. Other people using Diaspora on other sites would be able to participate with your groups, and people using your site would be able to participate in theirs. No idea if it'll hold out against Facebook, but it had a good kickstarter behind it at the start and it's had some good press. It's all in Ruby, so you should be able to handle the coding on it.

I haven't done it myself though. I really should setup a diaspora site to play with it...

Yeah Diaspora is interesting - will be cool to see where it ends up.

But... I have my own vision for a SN and don't like the idea of being forced to follow someone else's.

I guess we'll see whether people share my vision on not within the next year or two

Yeah, you'll have to show us so we can understand it better. It's hard to do anything with social networks that hasn't been done previously, so if you have something unique...

You might see if you can make it compatible with diaspora in some way even if it's written from scratch. I think they have open APIs.

For sure - you guys will get a beta invite

How about? IPB3. The latest in state of the art forum technology.

Although, it's expensive.

Link - http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/

Compared to vBulletin, I think that's cheap.