We’ve had a ton of interest in our previous MeWe article as former Google+ users continue to try and find a new social media home. YouTube channel Uncle Matt’s RPG Studio sat down with MeWe product director Jason Hardy to ask some questions and get some answers. The full interview with Jason Hardy will follow, but here are some of the more interesting bits I took away from this. Our thanks to Matt for conducting this interview.
- When public posts launch on MeWe, they will not be public to the world, only public to MeWe users. This means you won’t be able to share post links outside of MeWe without non-MeWe users having to log in.
- Public posts will be indexed and searchable by all MeWe users. So if you post something on a specific topic in public, your post can be found through a simple MeWe search. MeWe also plans on adding Open Group posts to the search index, which should broaden the landscape for many.
- Shared posts will eventually show proper attribution to the original poster as they currently work more like a copy-paste. This can be unclear to some users who think the sharing user wrote the post when it actually came from another user.
- Public posts will be available on user profiles. This helps other users gauge how like-minded that person is and can assist in choosing by connecting or not. Currently, profiles only show general information and no posts.
- Circles and Collection type functionality will not be available in the same way as implemented by Google Plus. Instead, “closed circles” will roll out with public posts, which will allow you to specify which contacts you want to share with.
- MeWe operates on a freemium business model, so they do not make money from advertising. They don’t sell your data to other companies nor sell advertising based on your profile. Instead, the company makes money by selling upgrades and features within the mobile app and soon desktop. An example is the forthcoming Pages feature. Pages will allow you to create a Page for your business or website, but it will cost the page owner $2.99USD a month. Hardy says charging for Pages will help battle users creating useless pages that benefit no one. One other way MeWe makes money is with cloud storage. Users are afforded 8GB of free storage, but you either have to pay to upgrade or delete content you have in the cloud when you hit that mark. So the core features of MeWe are available for free to all, but they will be offering more premium paid features in the future.
- Dark mode is coming and will be a premium feature and cost .99USD. Which I think is a reasonable cost and does help keep MeWe operating.
I had the opportunity to connect with Jason after he read our first MeWe article. He thanked us for that piece and will be looking into those features our Google Plus readers want in MeWe. I did pose a follow-up question, though, that concerned verified accounts.
Will MeWe have verified users?
We do have verified accounts. We will also have verified pages.However, getting verified is pretty limited because we haven’t created a great system to verify people and pages yet. Right now if you have a verified twitter or verified Facebook account we will let you send us a message from that verified account and then verify you here at MeWe.
There was more talk about granular community and page features and a whole lot of other information. Be sure to check out the entire interview below with Jason Hardy.
What do you think of MeWe? What did you think of the Jason Hardy interview? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and soon to come… MeWe!
Last Updated on February 10, 2021.
