Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative
post.newsOP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup.
I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.)
Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.)
The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will.
Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.
Nice to see a tokenadult comment after I don't want to check how long!
How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternative" narrative - twitter gets more user base and more likely is going to succeed in future iterations - while "alternatives" get stuck in the past.
How many failed startups tried to go against facebook, as "social networking alternative" as a rebellion to some bad facebook press, policies or scandals? How many of those succeeded? None.
Reddit comes to mind as an alternative (to Digg) that succeeded (by at least some definitions of the word). A massive amount of Reddit's early user growth came from a poorly-received redesign to Digg's home page. There are a lot of parallels to draw to the changes Musk has in mind for Twitter.
Difference here is that we don't see people leaving at massive scale. Maybe it's to early. Anyway, I think chances are 50-50 twitter succeeds in re-launch. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome. But I would be surprised to see something else explodes in popularity just because it's twitter alternative.
The issue is that if you wait until people start leaving it's too late. The bet here (and IMO it's a fair one) is that Twitter will continue to degrade as a service and eventually people will start leaving. If your alternative is up and running by then you've got a chance of capturing users.
Who says people aren't already leaving?
Twitter platform stats: https://botsentinel.com/stats/platform-stats
Reddit also existed at the time and was a fairly mature product. It wasn't Reddit coming in after Digg, it was Reddit and Digg slugging it out in the market and Reddit coming out on top when Digg cratered.
Reddit had a clear killer feature with user created and moderated subreddits though, which Digg lacked.
The current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow.
(posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is what Elon means by free speech)
That's because, up until a few weeks ago, joinmastodon.com was a spam domain. It's only recently been purchased and redirected to the real domain: joinmastodon.org
If you post the correct link which is joinmastodon.org there's no problem.
The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post.
I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them."
Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.
I like the goals and intent behind it, that alone is worth it. Most comments here don’t even debate Noams welcome words. A platform that isn’t a wild west race to the bottom of ad revenues? Sign me up! Micro payments for valued content? Heck yeah!
Existing platforms that use micropayments just end up filled with content optimized for micropayments. Just like reddit is filled with content that is optimized for upvotes.
In tech - today's leaders will not be tomorrow's leaders. The tech graveyard is full of former high fliers.
How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.
Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.
I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.
> How people don't get it
well, for one, because you're wrong. I mean, it's not like a hard topic to research, a walk in any supermarket should be plenty evidence, even before reaching the cereals section.
if you want something more aking technological, you can stop by the mobile phone shelf.
and if you insist with software, the choice is so ample whole sites exists just to help people navigate https://alternativeto.net/software/3ds-max/?license=commerci...
Sorry, but what's this grocery-market proof you're alluding to?
There are many counter precedents. The most prominent in my mind is Zoom: exactly like all the others with only slight differences, zero-to-100% market share in 3 years.
There’s an important difference between competing on features and competing on “x but not x”. Zoom (which is over a decade old) is video conferencing software, it’s not “webex but not webex”. Zoom stands alone, it competes on quality of service. Starting a “Twitter alternative” is not the same as building a short-form social media service (even if it does eventually become a Twitter alternative).
I think you underestimate MS Teams marketshare. If I'm not mistaken, I've read somewhere Zoom is loosing ground with each Q to competitors. But MS dominates now, for sure. Also worth pointing out, almost none of these online conferencing products were "alternatives to X". They all had their own unique propositions. Superior video quality and streaming, collaboration tools etc. Those who build "alternatives" - fail.
We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon.
The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social
The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.
In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.
Your numbers are a bit off. It's 7m total up from ~5.6m before all this, not active. The active count historically drops back down to ~100k after booms, but this one does seem different and sustained due to the different circumstances. It's usually a small burp in a specific community. It's never been all of Twitter's most active users from across all communities considering alternatives.
It's one thing to get users. It's another to keep them. Mastodon's user experience is godawful. It might be an IRC replacement for nerds, but it'll never be Twitter.
I've found Mastodon's UI to be so vastly superior to Twitter that it isn't even funny. Volunteers are running circles around Twitter's UI team.
How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.
The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.
I’m willing to bet a pretty penny that the next big social media will be built on the fediverse.
> Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes
A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks.
Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.
The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user.
Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
> have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
Excluding or severely limiting virality is the essential criterion for any Twitter replacement.
That said, though I like and use Mastodon (as I do Linux), it is just not going to get Twitter-scale mass adoption. It is not, and believing to the contrary is just obvious delusion.
Maybe post.news will. It's worth a try. But if it doesn't attenuate virality, it won't improve on Twitter enough to be worth the trouble.
Twitter became Twitter by branding functionality that everyone with an email address already had access to, and slapping a simpler interface on it. Could that be replicated? The historical success of innumerable chat startups suggest it could be.
The successor to Twitter has an advantage that Twitter didn't have, which is an existing social graph ready to migrate. If a critical mass of the Twitter graph moves to Mastodon, and the interface and experience can be made as simple as Twitter, it has a chance.
Do you have any actual facts to back this up? I would be interested to know why you are so sure of this.
I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example:
You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.
Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.
The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.
Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.
Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.
Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out.
How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
@jeremyjh I genuinely appreciate your comments! Allow me to kindly respond...
> ...best way to follow my interests...
If you're still stuck on the topic of following interests, may i direct your attention to the following website: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi...
And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of the above website. I have no affiliation, but have found it handy to give out to newcomers to the Fediverse - regardless if such newcomers are using the Mastodon *software*, or pixelfed, or funkwhale instances, etc. The "Beginners Start Here" area of the website is a section i highly suggest you and all newcomers to spend time reviewing.
> ...How much time will the average twitter user invest into this?
I'm detecting in your statement that there is an assumption that the commercial socials (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the Fediverse have the same goals....but i believe they differ. Most instances on the Fedi are cool with being village-sized communities that can easily interconnect with all/many other village-sized communities...The Fedi's goal is not to have a single, massive commercializable silo. There is no such overacrhing goial to scale up at all cost, as might exist for commercial services. While, there are no doubt paid Fedi instances that legitimately are commercial by their definiton and operation, their goals are not as audacious as the entities coming out of Silicon Valley. So, if some newcomers struggle during onboarding, while i never want to see people struggle, maybe its not the end of the world if newcomers have to invest a little time in learning the ways and customs of what amounts to a new world for them.
> ...I'm just...skeptical it can take off...
You have every right to your opinion of course! That being said, as I noted above, the Fedi cares less if it "takes off". Its goals are more about quality of connections rather than numbers of connections. Richer and more fulfilling interactions are sought after, while brazen increases of follower counts are not.
I should also clarify facts here: Mastodon - the software and initial instance/server - only started life late 2016. While the greater Fediverse (that mastodon is only one part of) has been in existence since around 2008. Yes, that's right, none of this is new! Not the networks, nor the latest wave of newcomers. So, while you (and some other newcomers) doubt this will take off - well before this latest wave of newcomers - there have been already millions of active users interacting with each other for almost a decade and a half.
If you're willing to invest a little time/effort, then please by all means do participate on the Fediverse, and enjoy. But, if you don't think it is worth it, that's fine too; no harm, no foul.
Thanks for the kind reply and pointers to information. But if the Fediverse is not trying to take off, how can you you describe it as “mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.”? This new thing has ambitions at Twitter scale and beyond.
The Fediverse en masse - and most participants that i have met on the Fedi in my 13 or so years on this thing - are not trying to "take off". However, the beauty of the freedom of the underlying protocols and other mechanisms like the software employed (with mastodon being only one example), offer the ability to scale up *if so desired*...But, again, my experience tells me that the vast majority like it as-is. For Mr. Bardin, while he might wish to scale his effort up to Twitter-like scale, i merely wished that he used some of the open source software already used and developed on the Fedi....with the benefit of more and continued universal interaction. There is already precedent, such that the mastodon.social instance is maybe one of the biggest if not the biggest instance on the Fedi (Of course, i know its not twitter scale, but its still pretty huge relatively speaking)....but the size of a big instance doesn't stop other instances from happlily staying small, but while still allowing for interaction among all. That's all i'm saying.
Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown.
Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed.
Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
Apparently this is the key difference they're working on for Bluesky. Trying to make accounts truly portable between federated servers.
IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org.
Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit.
I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.
> Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads.
Too true. And in cases like that, I have already blocked bitcoinhackers.org .
And it's trivial to block individuals OR whole servers from your account. And server admins can block as well to the whole server.
So, sure, go ahead and make a spam-stodon. You'll be defederated within a week.
Users don't want convoluted nonsense like Mastodon. They want a one-click sign up and ease of use.
That's always been the assumption, but a lot of people are trying it anyway.
By a lot of people, do you mean 0.3% of Twitter users?
A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for.
That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure for Mastodon. This isn't a zero-sum game.
It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.
Assuming that Twitter doesn't crash and burn in the next week or so, and assuming Mastodon doesn't draw enough users to create its own network effect, sure. But then, people don't always act according to a single metric. Mastodon doesn't have ads and it doesn't follow a single moderation policy. I can see people sticking with both for different reasons.
If you think that Mastodon cannot be bought and ruined by billionaires, you are wrong.
It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
Sure, there are embrace-and-extinguish scenarios with decentralized protocols. But the alternative is that you’re always in the grip of some billionaire’s fever dream right from the start. Mastodon is live and resilient right now. The future is up to the users.
It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.
Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.
Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.
You find what instance your friends are on and sign up there, same as any website? I did it last week and it was trivial.
Maybe that’s what we need but it’s definitely not what people want and it will never succeed in its current form. The whole motivation for a lot of people is to get their voice out to as many people as possible, not to indulge their interests in specific niches.
Sounds awful. I don't go on Twitter to "learn" from my betters (presumably, the founder includes himself in that category).
If you look at FTX, you have these supposed "journalists" quoting from "Autism Capital" on Twitter...that is where their sources are. I am guessing "Autism Capital" is some random guy, in his mom's bedroom, making no money from this...and there are journalists taking down $80k/year just ripping stories from that.
The question this should raise is: why do we need the journalists? These people are pointless, they don't have interesting opinions, they are just information tollgates, Twitter removes that friction totally (equally, I worked in finance, I started working just before the Twitter age and assumed that everyone else was very diligent/knowledgeable/doing lots of good research...and then all these people hopped onto Twitter, start outputting more information, and you realise they are just total idiots...which I also realised after working in the industry, Twitter exposes the man behind the curtain).
Give me the anonymous cesspit. If it makes you mad and upset, don't go on there, that is on you. The doctor can't be blamed for the needle being sharp.
The psuedojournalists you are referring to are worse than simple plagiarizers: they share content they lack the capacity to analyze, but still add their own spin.
I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.
They are also overwhelmingly people who get triggered by random people they don't know online, and are pushing for this narrowing of the information space so that their safety/income is maintained.
You are right, the spin is as bad as the copying. Always an agenda, that agenda is never made explicit, every event, same underlying cause. It often seems we have the worst possible people in that role of relaying information (and I do actually feel more comfortable with someone who doesn't pretend to be either objective or, shock, even particularly serious).
Oh it's another ad disguised as an article
it's called Advertorial :(
More options are a good thing, but his Twitter alternative might be misidentifying Twitter's actual strongest point. Allow me to elaborate and tell me if you disagree, but this is how I feel: I never used twitter because of the social aspects. At all. I'm not there because I want to have a chat. I just use Twitter to get new artwork from artists I like or follow game devs who post their content there. For me, Twitter's real value was always content sharing. The social aspect was tolerable at best and detrimental at worst, which is why I don't want to use an alternative explicitly focusing on the social aspect. What I really want is a Twitter with content creation focus, instead of social. I think most alternatives are focusing on the social aspects, so I thought I should share this sentiment.
> "Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad?"
Nostalgia alert. Social media used to provide 100% value all the time? Trolls didn't exist 10 years ago? "Rational debates" were thriving with a 140 character limit? When Twitter became a resource for learning about research on Covid and coverage of protests worldwide - surely subjects that would be fair game on "Post"[0] - I was certainly getting a lot of utility, but I can't honestly say I never felt angry or sad. This all just feels incredibly naive, like we can just turn back the clock.
[0] Speaking of nostalgia, I long for a future where company/product names aren't just dictionary words anymore.
It's the fake past, like back in the day when people actually cared about craftsmanship, customer service, and their lawns, and weren't so offended all the time or so scared of hard work.
I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.
It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...
Last time I checked Gab was 10m+ users.
Gettr gets 7m visits per month according to similarweb.
"Very few people" is a bit of an understatement...
All of these stats are somewhat meaningless without common definitions. Number of users is not the same as active users.
If we compare similarweb’s estimates visits it’s 10.6 million for Gab and 7 billion for Twitter. Maybe it’s just my personal definition but these site were set up as direct competitors to Twitter and getting 0.1% of your main competitor’s traffic is definitely “very few people”.
Who likes Twitter culture?
There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical mind about what they posted.
I think a big part of what "Twitter culture" is it was many things for many people. Some people use as a place for weird shit posting, some use it for porn, some enjoy bias confirmation, some enjoy the drama and beef. I guess some people enjoy anime avatar reply-guys since some of the new offshoots seem to be catering to maximize them.
For me Twitter would have been better if it didn't have any of that but I get that using it as basically a shitty, short-form substack isn't the most popular usecase. So what I liked about "twitter culture" is that all of these things could co-exist on one site and just curating who you followed could dramatically change that experience.
With a lot of the current drama some of the more serious people are leaving. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but I don't expect my use case to stay intact.
I enjoyed Twitter for these same reasons. I have to be honest though that it took time & effort to cultivate it to do what I wanted, as it didn't do that straight away without effort. I'm disappointed that all that work will come to nothing and I'll have to start over at square one with a new service, whatever it turns out to be.
In the meantime, Twitter is still running and will continue to soar triumphantly in a straight line on autopilot, until its fuel runs dry and its wreckage comes to a gentle landing at the bottom of a deep dark abyss.
I wouldn't say I like the culture because I don't actively participate in Twitter. What I do like is the curated list of folks I've built up over the last 15 years.
Twitter allows me to keep up with Technologists, comedians, journalists in one location which has made it very useful to me. That made Twitter sticky for me personally.
Unfortunately, Elon has probably pissed off enough people that I'm going to have to branch out to other services anyway so that immediately reduces the value of Twitter.
People who deem themselves to be important.
This is the key perceptive question!
Over 200 million active monthly users.
Those networks were all marketed to Twitter cast-offs, specifically those people who were cast-off for the content they were producing. When your site is "The Alternative to Platform X" and consists of only users who got kicked off of X for bad behavior, the content is just going to be radioactive.
The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.
I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform.
To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.
At this point anyone who willingly joins a new VC funded social media monstrosity is just a masochist.
Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user.
The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok.
Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.
> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.
Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.
Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to users on a centralised platform is that their potential reach is that entire platform's user base. The exact same is true for any other platform, but the numbers differ by orders of magnitude, and as we all know: bigger number must be better.
This is not a refutation because I think that you’ve given a nice response to the topic. But I think that the people who are concerned or interested with reaching “everyone” deserve being beholden to the Big Box platforms of today; whichever ones rise and gain steam in the future that use phrases like “foster dialogue and bring people together” in lieu of “drive engagement and bring in ad dollars” then crash and burn under the weight of internal whistleblowers and damning The Guardian exposés.
I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”
"quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.
It might feel that way, but I promise you it's definitely not "everyone".
Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not).
So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you.
Is that larger than you're going to get on your own site? Probably.
Is that everyone? fuck no. It's basically no one. You're reaching the worst 5% of the country - those who have nothing better to do than browse twitter, or those who are using twitter to promote themselves.
Tweets often do reach much further than active users of the Twitter platform as they are often embedded in mainstream news stories and such.
Sure - but that's true of every site on the web. Conflating mainstream media's reach with Twitter's is fairly disingenuous, since mainstream media also highlights basically every other platform in similar ways.
The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.
Definitely not true of every site on the web. I tried searching for mentions of hackernews (a relatively large forum, and also vc backed, not independent) on the nytimes website. One result https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/magazine/the-3-10-13-issu...
Most media sources aren't embedded in small forums.
I see roughly 400... https://imgur.com/a/QirnOG5
Admittedly - it's fairly certain that some of those will be about ycombinator itself - but I don't really find that outside the scope of the ask - given that many of the hits for twitter are really just following the company drama and not expanding the reach of a single user's tweet.
Couldn’t find a single other mention of the specific website. I don’t think talking about the company counts, since we’re talking about how much things that circulate on Twitter make it in the news. I can point you to 1000s of tweets that have been in nytimes articles, but only 1 hackernews post
Which, if they can be spread outside of Twitter, refutes the earlier point that "influence stops at the water". The web is the platform.
Mmmh everyone that I follow or Twitter thinks I should read. I follow Musk on Twitter and I don't see any of his shitposting, or I don't see many celebs or journalists tweets either. Am I not one of the everyones?
Why should people populate your island when the smart thing to do is make their own?
That is exponentially more difficult.
> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.
One of those things is not like the others.
This HN website, phpBB forums, etc., don't interface with other systems. Mastodon does. Usenet and BBS' problem was more that they just predated the massive influx of always-online users that came with the advent of smartphones.
It's not like Twitter is a single server through which all content gets pushed. It's a replicated, distributed network of servers. ActivityPub servers are too, except the shards in network are not all owned by the same entity.
How would you learn about something via Twitter, sans promoted tweets? You'd find out about it from the retweets of the people you follow. That's literally the same thing you'd do in a Mastodon instance.
The big difference is that nobody in the ActivityPub network has the power to force content into your feed. Hasn't that been one of the biggest complaints of mid-2000s era social media? That the algorithm takes presidence over your own preferences? Never in my life do I want to see another "here's one weird trick you can do with a couple of pennies in the bottom of a plastic bag" click-bait article. That's basically impossible to propagate within the ActivityPub network. But that doesn't mean nothing can propogate through the network.
I'm having long, engaging conversations about topics I care about with people within the ActivityPub network. Almost none of those people are on the Mastodon instance I am currently inhabiting. I'm having more of these conversation than I had on Twitter, where I have 15x the number followers. From my perspective, my word is getting out further through ActivityPub than it ever did on Twitter.
Let's just go back to FIDOnet
What makes Mastodon not able to accomplish this?
The trouble with Mastodon that I’ve seen (on Twitter) is folks are a bit confused with its federated nature. They’re not sure which server to use nor the “rules” governing that server.
Mastodon is really better suited as a collection of smaller communities much like Reddit's r/ forums then for one “universal” platform.
It’s already had some scaling issues with folks trying to use it as well.
Key technical decisions made early on kneecap its ability to be performant and to scale to anything approaching Twitter's userbase size, if instances want to still be part of the fediverse.
What are those decisions, got a link?
As far as I know, Mastodon is a federated system, so there‘s no mechanism to have an algorithm pick certain content and massively boost its distribution across the network.
>The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences.
But reaching a larger audience is inherently negative, not positive. What is the purpose for speaking to 10,000 users vs 10-20 users? If for marketing, or some other money making scheme, sure there is an advantage. But for users who care about specific content, what value does a cacophony of noise offer? As it is, unity and cohesion will always master diversity and confusion, so shouldn't a "larger audience" be the antithesis of what adds value to a platform?
To a degree, such things can even be seen in major platforms themselves. If we go to something like YouTube, there are different categories of content, and within each categories, sub-genres of content sorted by various factors users are truly interested in. It then does not make sense to attempt to reach the audience invested in makeup tutorials, to also foster users and content around HFT on NASDAQ. If anything, one group would accidentally stumble over the other, and be the worse off for it. This in turn, would hurt both communities atmospheres, and degrade the "convenience factor" of the platform itself. (The more categories and unrelated categories, the harder it is for the user to navigate the platform to find "worthwhile" content, and the harder it is for the owners to curate the UGC.)
Not everyone is a wanna be influencer who wants to reach a billion people. If that’s the case private Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups wouldn’t be as popular as they are.
But many people are. It's the same mentality as buying a lottery ticket.
Why is broadcasting the high order bit? I personally don't want to scream my message to thousands of people. I want a high signal:noise two way dialogue with a small group of people who know what they are talking about.
Discoverability, basically. You can get a lot of incredibly good information from Twitter with a very carefully curated follow list. You can get that from Mastodon as well, but you're going to have a much harder time finding the same people in a fully decentralized world. I think I'd rather that existence, which I'm noticing as I wind up in more niche Facebook groups and Discord servers than on broader platforms like Instagram or Twitter, but it's not zero value per se.
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large.
In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.
I’ve been finding this to be the case with the fediverse so far. I have different accounts on Mastodon and Bookwyrm, since Bookwyrm is more tailored to book reviews and quotes. But I can follow Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Peertube, and Pixelfed accounts from one main “reader” feed, providing more of a mix than I ever got on one platform alone.
Agree, that's why I say in theory it's a good replacement. I don't yet buy it'll take off. I find it much more likely that we start seeing a bunch of walled gardens pop up instead. But if I'm wrong, then great.
> The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites.
With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
One acronym: RSS
I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.
>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc.
I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.?
Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the intent to keep users on their platform for many hours at a time.
Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform, and allow users to find that other content outside of the site would be a "better" way to manage their experience on the platform. For example, a platform devoted to Formula 1 would not be a good place to inject articles about COVID information or political events. It wouldn't be a good place to do so, not just because it would be severely off topic, but also because it would be managed by people who would otherwise be focused on curating the topic they are (presumably) knowledgeable on.
Basically, I'm saying it's not a good idea to get news updates from Twitter for the same reason why it's not a good idea to get a sushi from a gas station bathroom.
I use(d) Twitter as more of a meta-aggregator. It had actual social interactions combined with the sort of pointers out to news sites, tech blogs, etc. Perhaps I'm an outlier in how I use(d) it but I haven't come across anything that provided the same degree of convergence. This is precisely because it's mixing in short snippets from friends, acquaintances, and other people I find interesting.
> Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform
That's my point. I'm saying the thing I liked most about Twitter was that there wasn't a single "subject of the platform". Don't get me wrong, I also spend plenty of time in more specific corners of the internet, but I've yet to find something that quite replicates Twitter for me.
That's fair. Personally, I like to keep things separated from one another for obvious reasons (controversial topics mixed with friends/family can lead to issues) but I can also see that others might prefer a single source.
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it.
The absolute majority of the people on the planet have neither the time and technical knowledge, nor the desire to maintain their own platforms or stacks.
Decentralized communities suffer from all the problems of user-friendliness and ease of maintenance that Open Source generally suffers from.
Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
I've run an online community since 2001 and I've yet to meet the boogeymen of self-hosting. A small site and forum with ~100 users doesn't cost a shit to run ($5 per month, the cost of a coke and a sandwich where I live), updates itself automatically via CPanel, and it isn't much of an issue if it goes down for an hour or two every other year. That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content, and for not having to tolerate "redesigns". Twitter is probably down more than a standard Apache server.
Where are you hosting that still offers CPanel on a $5/month plan?
That's an acceptable cost for not having to submit to anyone's whims about allowed content
Only 100 users and anything goes --- yes, I can see how that might be acceptable. I can also see how most people might have little to no interest in participating.
The small community can make its own rules. I’ve seen Mastodon instances with both stricter and less strict rules than Twitter. And it’s fine because people can just spin up a new instance if they don’t like it.
Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.
Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way.
On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.
> It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation
And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.
If you want to work for free, Reddit will gladly accommodate.
But they also have thousands of very well paid employees. Average salary $150K+.
Indeed they do. And on that team is a massive number of salespeople who are constantly farming the world for advertising dollars and a large team of machine learning engineers helping to ease the burden of moderation.
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
That would be the fediverse (Mastodon).
Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing.
Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user.
> To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.
And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next.
And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it
I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.
I'd like to think that the "killer app" for the fediverse isn't going to be Mastodon or the other current alternatives but the ActivityPub protocol or something akin to it.
Whereas decentralized online communities have existed, they were mostly isolated which meant that users had to make multiple accounts if they wanted to participate in various niche interests.
Now that you can create one account in one server and still be able to participate in other federated communities in a "global square" if you wanted to is an important departure from communities of the past.
I make music, and for that small communities like mastodon just don't work. In order to be heard and to grow a following, you need to be able to just be heard by a wide variety of people-- That visibility is exactly what sites now sell (nefariously and deceptively) as a commodity that often doesn't return the investment...
Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media.
I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms.
This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump.
What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model.
People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.
I also make music, and have found the Fediverse to be a far more welcoming and varied place than commercial social media. Sure, I'm only getting maybe hundreds of impressions - but that's better than the dozens I got organically (without paying) on Twitter. I'm not making a living from my music - but from your profile it looks like you're not either.
Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale.
Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.
I agree. If these aren't public benefit corporations, I'm not interested.
I used to gleefully ridicule all things Twitter. But I've come to see it as more of a public benefit than a public menace. The automated censoring aggravates me because it does get things wrong, even after requesting review. So a tweak was in order, but this is not that kind of tweak, it's worse. I think we need something like it. I'm not sure if one is enough or if two is too many.
>> Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform.
Come on, you are getting A LOT from all those platforms. You feed someone else's enterprise just as much as it feeds you. Those who have even small audiences get a lot of value, not sure why you are trying to picture it as one way street.
> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
So just group chats.
People will, for the time being at least, want what these platforms give them, which is the illusion of reach and a constant feed of stimulation. I feel like I don't get the from, say, Mastodon and I think personally think that's ok.
The problem lies with advertisers. They have become centralized by 2 companies. If it was possible to monetize small communities it would be great, but it hasn't been for 10+ years.
It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers
So then build your own: https://qbix.com/platform
I prefer a functional inside out approach. Getting funding for it and start up soon, but you will own everything.
I'll be cheering it on anyway, just because it's fun to watch Musk burn his money.
I saw their sign up page asking for Linkedin and whatnot, and noped out of there.
Only your email address is required, the rest of the information is optional.
Cause they crave an audience, and find technical challenges in alternatives.
>Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb
Exactly. Landlords should not exist.
"Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden,"
Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.
HN is not a powerful walled garden.
It’s a site mostly used to share links and comments. Places like it abound on the internet.
In case of any shenanigans, they’re liable to lose users to an alternative faster than you can say digg.
Even though it’s owners are powerful people in tech, I’m willing to bet it’s not generating billions for them.
And with anonymous accounts, their incentive to harvest data and use it for ad targeting is little.
And hacker news content is searchable and accessible by anyone on the internet, not hidden like on so many other services.
This is a big deal for so many things, where solutions and advice can be retrieved instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
With Twitter usage apparently climbing, why is this important? Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?
I don't believe it's climbing in the real sense. I think people like watching disasters unfold, they are taking to their Twitter feed to see news of its fast moving downfall. Refreshing to see what the next ridiculous move is, and getting that dopamine hit when it happens. It's not sustainable growth.
Also people logging in to export their history count as DAU.
Basically. Lots of people hate Musk. Lots of Twitter blue-checks hate Musk. This is an attempt to capitalize on this hate and come up with yet another platform that would be identical to all the other platforms.
By what metric is it climbing? DAU's? Signups? People exporting all their data?
Musk has no incentive to be truthful here anyway. He's in the middle of what could end up being one of the most embarrassing failures the last 50 years. Destroying a 44 billion dollar business in 3 weeks through sheer, unadulterated hubris and incompetence. There's nothing people love more than watching people fall from grace so I have a feeling that folks will remember this.
People are reporting twitter has retained less than 10% of pre-Elon employees now.
Certainly plausible that twitter could survive without significant downtime, but it seems unlikely at this point: it appears Elon has been taking big reckless actions and he'll need to rapidly pivot to smart measured actions to keep infrastructure from tipping over.
> Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?
If it weren't true, why would there be a hundred articles a day about it, and a US President announcing in a press conference that Musk's connections to foreign governments should be investigated?
>Twitter usage apparently climbing,
Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?
And according to whom? Musk, who has no legal, economic, or moral incentive to be truthful?
There are people who are happy to use products that benefit Elon Musk, and reward his behavior.
There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.
Idk if you’re an engineer or not but there’s an aspect of “reading the room” that your comment fails to capture. You can take the superficial tweets on usage for what they are but there are larger things happening around those specific statements that would lend themselves to “Twitter is actually dying this time.”
I'm really excited to see competition in this market. I wish Twitter the best, and I hope Elon succeeds with that. I also hope Noam succeeds. And maybe they will push each other to be better for users overall.
One fear I have is that platforms will divide along ideological lines and inhibit respectful disagreement and open conversation. We seem to be short enough on that already and I really don't want it to get worse. It's so important for us to acknowledge that the people "on the other side" are also smart, well educated, and want the best for people - just like we do.
“Protocols, not platforms” is the way to go, as Mike Masnick lays out.[1]
What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse.
[1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
so why do they need to know my linkedin profile?
I know it's optional, just curious about their motives for data collection.
Most likely they'll do a Facebook style thing - launch with some level of exclusivity to build buzz.
They're obviously trying to curate the supply side of the knowledge marketplace.
I was able to sign up without filling that out at all.
The waiting list is shortened if you invite 5 friends with a special link. Whomever posted this basically invited all of us.
I think twitter's "high" traffic right now is akin to a traffic jam on the motorway because people slow down to watch that horrible terrible accident...
Pretty sneaky, using your referral link in this context.
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it.
Growing a garden on someone else's land means I don't need to worry about the upkeep. To continue your metaphor, leasing farm land is literally a thing people do. I genuinely do not believe the large majority of people want to worry about hosting, community management, etc etc. The people that do are in the extreme minority.
>To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user.
You are using Hacker News right now because there is an audience and community. That is the upside to the user.
This manifesto is generic enough that it aligns with all existing social-network platforms. So this Twitter alternative is bringing nothing new to the table.
Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.
NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse.
Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard.
Until Mastodon finds a way to let the average user sign up without any friction, it will never be more than a small niche service.
I'm very interested in seeing how Twitter dying shakes out in terms of social media. Frankly, I don't think people "get it" and that includes me. From where I sit no one wants to self-host, no one wants to be advertised to, but no one wants to pay for anything either. As always, one million "alternatives" will be made, they will die one by one in some Squid Game style battle royale and then society will choose one and the cycle continues.
Why? Why even get in this race, there is nothing to win. Win by not playing, and just give those millions of dollars that were about to commit to losing anyway to local schools, community centers, food banks, and hey maybe just buy housing for the homeless (oh no, so unfair! they got a house for free! All they had to do was be on the brink of death every single day!). Do something good with those dollars instead.
Fleeing one centralized platform into another is futile, and will end in the same problems.
I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others:
https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
I read it till waitlist... I get it but also... I don't want to wait, by the time they send me email, I will forget what it was.
I think there is a place for, not Twitter alternatives, but for newer ways how we can be social and connect and discover interesting people. And I do welcome those explorations and want to support it, but waitlist is not something I enjoy.
Haven't seen discussed yet, but for me the killer feature would be the ability they mention to be able to pay for individual "articles". I.e. maybe a federated micropayment news feed where i don't have to subscribe to NYTimes AND WaPo, AND (many others), but only pay pennies for individual stories.
mastodon is surprisingly good, imo. I joined about a year ago. It worked fine, but it was basically dead for me. I didn't know who to follow and I couldn't find anything interesting to do. Everything changed in the last couple of weeks. It's busy now. People are posting and interacting. A large chunk of German twitter moved over to mastodon completely. And a good chunk of electronics twitter is also now on mastodon. My timeline is simply a chronological order of post of people that I follow, no suggested post, no advertisement, etc. It's very possible the whole twitter-is-dead talk will be over in a week. But mastodon has some real traction.
What if, someone just wakes a twitter clone, charges a small amount, keeps it simple, makes some profit and doesn't get greedy. Every decent tech thing over that last 10 years once it goes big and vc and markets are involved it goes to shit.
Twitter shouldn't be a service, it should be a protocol. Technically, when Twitter launched it didn't offer much you couldn't already do with email and listserv.
Billionaires gotta billionaire. Instead of promoting a healthy, sustainable platform, everyone just wants to lock people into their walled garden to extract money from them.
> Write posts of any length and share them broadly
So, not Twitter. The 240-char limit of Twitter is really essential to its eclectic dynamic.
There was probably an opportunity a few weeks ago to create a social network only for the elites who could prove that they had a Twitter verified account (e.g. by putting a verification code in the bio / description). That would create crazy amounts of FOMO! But unfortunately now anyone can get one, so it's not as attractive. :)
Wasn't what's name .... Jack Dorsey making some alternative?
Like a divorced dad making up for past grievances with his new, younger spouse.
That’s cheating. Your link is a referral link. Stop it.
He wasn't the founder of Waze, he was the CEO.
Cool! That's what we need! TWO Twitters!! One wasn't useless enough. How about we take all that time and energy and build a few fission plants.
We need more alternatives to Twitter. Hopefully one of them will excel.
Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.
> Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.
That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.
All i see is he started a wait list.
IRC forever!!!
> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other;
> Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them.
If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?
This is the hard problem in a nutshell and one thing that no-one who proposes "an alternative Twitter" seems to get.
Extreme free speech? Racism? Maybe. Racial hatred? No, I'm a bit uncomfortable now. Someone questioning the mainstream? Seems harmless; because lizards are taking over the world! No, you are mad but the person who thinks that Soros is taking over the world is welcoime because that sounds less mad.
Good luck.
He is a social media user, no more, no less. The problem is when we start attaching authority to that. And the less anonymous the platform, the more authority has an impact.
lol, what do the downvotes even mean in this context? Is this a stupid question?
It seems deeply ironic that Noam is starting a Twitter competitor, when he's mostly well-known for some comments he made about lazy startup employees which seem like something Elon Musk might have said. But then you realize it's not ironic at all.
>Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?
No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.
Elon Musk is literally inviting this with his self inflicted Twitter meltdown.
[flagged]
Oh fine, I'll articulate why. Musk doesn't know what he has bought.
He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that make nobody happy, but keep trouble at a minimum.
Musk is obviously incapable of doing this. He just started, and immediately spooked the advertisers. Then he started whining, and threatening both advertisers and his own employees, apparently not realizing that he has no real power over either.
It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. At this rate I expect him to be hit with fat fines from the EU, demands from various other countries to comply with their rules, piss off advertisers, run into trouble with illegal content of various kinds, and have stability issues and security exploits.
It's not that it offends me so much to have a conservative driven platform. It's that the man is clearly incompetent and flailing, and as amusing as that is to watch, it's clear the platform won't survive it so alternatives are needed.
>It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence.
I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue loss, thereby further amplifying losses.
As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis.
The problem is that he actually cannot afford to float Twitter until such time that the company becomes profitable (if ever). Hence the drastic cost-cutting measures.
> I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year.
That's incompetence
> His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue, thereby further amplifying losses.
And so is that.
> As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis.
Why not? I mean, maybe it'll keep existing for a while still, but given how it's starting, how is it going to get any better? It seems clear that the current trend is steeply downhill. So anybody who thinks alternatives are needed would do well starting to look for them, or starting to work on one.
>That's incompetence
It may well be. I guess it's a question of semantics. To me his ability to afford a money-losing company is the salient factor, not his chaotic early tenure as 'Chief Twit'.
>> As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis. >Why not?
1. Because none of his actions are irreversible.
2. If he acted responsibility, he still would be running a company that is losing billions (plus the extra debt he saddled it with) in a terrible economic climate. I don’t think he can afford it.
> 1. Because none of his actions are irreversible.
They are partially reversible, but definitely not fully reversible. For example, there's no taking away that Musk started his tenure by angering advertisers. He can apologize, he can make amends, but there's no taking away that some amount of the damage will remain, if only because some companies already made new plans, allocated their budget, and aren't about to tell some other company that they changed their mind because Musk said "sorry".
> 2. If he acted responsibility, he still would be running a company that is losing billions (plus the extra debt he saddled it with) in a terrible economic climate. I don’t think he can afford it.
Well, if he couldn't afford it before making things even worse, how is that not an existential crisis?
>if only because some companies already made new plans, allocated their budget, and aren't about to tell some other company that they changed their mind because Musk said "sorry".
How is that 'partially irreversible' ... a bunch of companies paused ad-buys for this quarter or maybe even next year. If Twitter becomes viable next year, you think advertisers wouldn't come back, this year, or next, or year after that?
>Well, if he couldn't afford it before making things even worse, how is that not an existential crisis?
That is the existential crisis. Not the incompetence, the lack of ability to afford Twitter. That would have been the case even if the early Musk tenure wasn't so chaotic.
> How is that 'partially irreversible' ... a bunch of companies paused ad-buys for this quarter or maybe even next year. If Twitter becomes viable next year, you think advertisers wouldn't come back, this year, or next, or year after that?
Any lost money is irrevocably lost. If I skipped on advertising in 2023 because I think Musk is an asshat, and then change my mind in 2024, I'm not going to double my budget to compensate. The money I didn't spend on Twitter in 2023 was spent on something else, and for Twitter was lost forever.
>The money I didn't spend on Twitter in 2023 was spent on something else, and for Twitter was lost forever.
Uh huh.
You're just playing semantic games now. I think we've reached a steady state here.
Not sure what's semantic or controversial here. If you take an unpaid year off work, you permanently lose a year's worth of wages. Yes, you will earn again next year, but the year you weren't earning isn't coming back. It's lost.
Same here.
Not one thing is different since he bought it. Nothing. Literally nothing. Some articulation that carefully explains...nothing about why anyone would be inclined to leave other then "zomg Elon doesn't like woke people noooo!"
Every word of that is seething with a deep hatred for people you have never met.
If they're "seething," what are you doing?
I don't know, but why don't you ask a leading question about it instead of actually making a point?
Elon Musk is a clown and it would be very entertaining to watch him lose $44B as Twitter crashes and burns, like slipping on a banana peel.
...but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting and I want to see it work out. I don't know much about this Noam Bardin person, but considering Waze is just another bottomless pit of data collection, my hopes aren't very high that this will be anything notable beyond having a unique page layout. I don't see a reason to use it over one of the many Mastodon instances.
Maybe Twitter's problems are due to the traditional business model, and shifting towards paid accounts might change that. Or, it might make them 10x worse. Idk, but it's certainly the most interesting thing happening in social media right now.
>but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting
Who says this platform wouldn't be reliant on advertising? You need to provide free access to build your social graph, and then you need advertising to monetize it. Paid subscription is more of a supplement at best (think YouTube/YouTube Premium).
How many twitter articles does hacker news need a day?
I get it, you're social media junkies and your main supplier is now giving you tainted stuff. I'm sorry but that has almost nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with your own shortcomings.
I mean, if nothing else, it’s a fascinating business case study playing out in real time.
"Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?"
No lol, wtf is he talking about