Ask HN: Why isn't anyone creating or promoting an alternative to Twitter?
In the midst of various problems faced by Twitter, an alternative application for Twitter has a great opportunity. As has happened during the migration of users from Digg to Reddit or from Yahoo to Google. But I don't see any Twitter alternatives popping up. There are a lot of alternatives popping up: BlueSky, Mastodon, Farcaster, nostr. There are also some older protocols that people are still building on like secure scuttlebutt. I've written about some of the differences of these protocols here: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1... That was a good read for me - someone who has heard of Mastondon and ActivityPub but hasn't really grokked the tech and definitely didn't know other alternatives. I wonder how much people are secretly just hoping Twitter dies with no replacement. Skepticism about social media is basically the default position for educated professionals now, who are likely to already have distanced themselves from Facebook. The Twitter users I know would be happy to get rid of it, if not for the perceived career benefits (likewise with LinkedIn). When Twitter no longer offers any ladder-climbing benefits for technocrats, it will degenerate to be a shittier cousin of Instagram. I want to have place where I can follow some people's written content without being "friends" with them. You already can with bookmarks/favorites. There's also the somewhat murdered RSS protocol. I follow Nitter feeds with Thunderbird. What about ladder-climbing benefits for artists? Not being an artist, I have no idea if this is a thing - but if so, I suppose the same logic applies; except I would expect artists to also be able to get value from photo/video content on Instagram or Tiktok to a much greater extent than technology workers. Honestly, because I don't see what problem Twitter is solving in the first place. Twitter popped into our reality as the winner in a time when social media was launching and everyone wanted to be a voice on the internet. And for that it works and thrives on its own momentum. But I'm not sure being a voice on the internet is actually a problem the needs a solution now that social media has matured and many people are backing away from it. Sure social media has matured but there are still millions of people who use twitter so the demand is clearly still out there. There are thousands of people who post on titter and millions who just use it as an unimportant and replaceable news stream. It's interesting because I don't know if it's possible for anything to truly replace Twitter. I think what will happen is people will splinter off into online forums where they feel most comfortable based on the level of moderation on each site and who is there. Twitter was unique in that everyone was on it, sadly I don't think we'll ever have that again. Because Twitter is fine. If you ignore the fud, the experience on Twitter hasn't changed at all. The probability of bankruptcy is rising the longer Musk is in control which would likely cause it to shut down completely! How many companies has Musk bankrupted? In this specific case he warned bankruptcy is a possibility. When the egomaniac admits he might fail, it's time to listen. Some commenters in other threads said he has at previous companies sent the "bankruptcy" email in the past, allegedly for the purpose of increasing worker productivity. Well, there's Mastodon, of course. I'm kind of surprised that whoever owns Tumblr this week isn't pushing it harder; Tumblr is, when it comes to it, more or less twitter without the character limit and with a much worse mobile app (most Twitter features were effectively copied from Tumblr). That said, I'm not sure that there needs to be a single direct replacement for Twitter; historically, when a social network dies, generally it isn't replaced by a direct clone but by different things. Actually, Tumblr has been hard at work promoting itself as an alternative to Twitter. Did you know that you can buy 2 blue check marks on Tumblr for only $7.99? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-... Have you actually tried mastodon? It's really slow. I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement, Note how few HN submissions point to masto posts, it's ~ 10,000:1 Tweets:Masto. > Have you actually tried mastodon? Yeah, I've largely moved over to Mastodon; most of the people I was most interested in following on Twitter are now there, so... > It's really slow. That's very instance-dependent. The one I use is pretty fast, certainly faster than Twitter these days (I note that loading timelines is no longer as snappy as it used to be.) I did previously use mastodon.online, and it was borderline unusably slow, granted. > I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. The UX is a mix of good and bad. It has a linear time-based feed with no helpful "suggestions", like Twitter a decade ago, which I would consider good. The UX around following people on other instances is bad (button to redirect you to your own instance) to comically bad (link to paste into your instance's search box) depending on instance setup... > I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement, It is different, and it's certainly not a replacement for _all_ Twitter usecases, but it's largely good enough for me; I'm mostly now using Twitter just to observe the implosion of Twitter. I doubt that, in five years, Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement. There may not be a single Twitter replacement. But it solves a decent subset of the things that Twitter solved for people, in a way that is in some ways nicer than Twitter (it never suggests that I follow weird Nazis, for instance). Thank you for the thoughtful and informative reply, sincerely. Everyones too busy building a note taking app. Or the new database or the programming language. Hey! my framework/language/app will be different because I'm smart. Google returned better search results than Yahoo, and Reddit was objectively a better experience than Digg 2.0. The move was a positive experience for the entire userbase and that isn't true for any of the current crop of Twitter alternatives. Well app.net[0] had great potential and got shutdown. From Wikipedia: > On May 6, 2014, the founders announced that subscription renewals had been so poor that there were no longer funds to retain development staff for App.net and future operations would be on a maintenance-only basis using contractors I used to love that platform in its heyday. You didn't have to pay with your data, you paid with a thing called, you know, money (an esoteric term in social media circles). Zuckerberg should be the obvious canidate for building a alternative. You could probably just use facebooks timeline logic. But he is too busy building the metaverse Reddit is a good example why; The technology isn't impossible, but it needs a business plan that's not traditional advertising to have an decent be exit. Who says they aren’t? I’ve been reached out to to help create one recently. I imagine there are several in the works. With what money? VC money? Which VC? What would the business model be exactly? Ad money is drying up as companies are slashing online ad budgets. Now I'm sure eventually if Twitter goes down, traditional media will settle on a specific app to promote heavily, but this time, it will be on their terms. The terms of traditional media are monthly paid subscription and ads in the paid subscription. I created one over the weekend :)
https://github.com/mag-/folx Stay tuned for launch next week! :) I actually had a really good idea for a social media site this month, just before Elon bought twitter. I've been working on the idea a bit, but without a strong network effect it might not go anywhere. People flocked to Twitter because of who was there. I have one as well. What's your killer feature? Mine is that it is invite-only, and if you break the rules, the person that invited you and everybody else they have invited gets booted from the platform. Apart from that, the only other rule is don't be illegal, don't spam, and post whatever the hell you want. I don't mean it to replace Twitter. It's more like a social experiment. If there are permanent social consequences to being twats, what would a social network be like? Also, given this major risk, you'd only invite people you really know or trust. I'm still ironing out the details of this thing. We'll see if I'll ever get to build it. I'm going the way Twitter used to be going towards, that is, enforcing good social behavior. I'm specifically going to work on identifying unjustifiable hate/bullying and moderating/banning those users. That will be the killer feature, and part of that will be in the techniques to do so efficiently and justly. Like yours, mine is also a social experiment, but I don't care if not everyone wants a place like that. I know that at the very least a lot of people do. Still, without enough users it would die. Right now this isn't a priority for me to build, but the code could be useful for other projects too, so why not. > the person that invited you and everybody else they have invited gets booted from the platform. A less extreme/draconian version of this sounds cool All other social media out there is not as draconian. You should use probably that, and they have more people. I want to test the hypothesis whether people can be nice and decent on the Internet without resorting to enforced real names and government approved access to the Web. Mind you, you'd need to be a terrible person to be booted. Posting child porn. Inciting murder. Botting and spamming. Doxing and organising a mob. Why should terrible people to have a free pass? Why should one have a free pass for inviting a terrible person? Again, I do not want to change the social media landscape. This would be performance art. I wouldn’t invest in a network where I can be booted for the bad behavior of somebody I’ve never met. Because it is not useful or cool at all? If some politician, VIP, or other billionaire want to declare a war or inform about their career change and hit the reader with a sign in wall, they can get a blog. 1/6 Kara Swisher recently interviewed Noam Bardin, the creator of: This seems like a public square with the exact opposite goals of Elon (heavy moderation) > We believe in freedom of speech and will oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform. However, we have rules, which we plan to rigorously enforce via content moderation, with the help of our community Bruh… That is, to a greater or lesser extent, more or less the approach taken by _every_ social network. Even 4chan has rules. Because it's already been here since 2016: Mastodon. I keep using Twitter and not much has changed for me in the last couple of weeks. Honestly I think most of it is FUD at this point. I guess because we are not in the 2010s anymore. Something new will probably emerge, but it won't be like Twitter. what about tumblr? that's where seemingly a lot of former twitter users are moving to Please no. Kill Twitter. Kill Facebook as well while we are at it. Mastodon Truth social ?