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.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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...
The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.
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).
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.
Gettr gets 7m visits per month according to similarweb.
"Very few people" is a bit of an understatement...
The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news 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.
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.
Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
So just group chats.
It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers
Exactly. Landlords should not exist.
Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?
There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.
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.
What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse.
[1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
I know it's optional, just curious about their motives for data collection.
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...
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.
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.
Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard.
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 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.
So, not Twitter. The 240-char limit of Twitter is really essential to its eclectic dynamic.
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.
> 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?
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.
No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.
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.
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.
...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.
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).
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.
No lol, wtf is he talking about
