OP 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
> 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!
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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. :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
tokenadult|3 years ago
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.
dang|3 years ago
mirzap|3 years ago
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.
dickfickling|3 years ago
pjc50|3 years ago
(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)
tokenadult|3 years ago
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.
maire|3 years ago
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.
avereveard|3 years ago
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...
jeffbee|3 years ago
thal3s|3 years ago
The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social
crsv|3 years ago
davoneus|3 years ago
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.
mxuribe|3 years ago
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).
KVFinn|3 years ago
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.
standardUser|3 years ago
johnday|3 years ago
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.
bergenty|3 years ago
leeroyjenkins11|3 years ago
[deleted]
skippyboxedhero|3 years ago
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.
cwkoss|3 years ago
I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.
personjerry|3 years ago
theCrowing|3 years ago
algurithm|3 years ago
jdelman|3 years ago
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.
pessimizer|3 years ago
0x445442|3 years ago
altacc|3 years ago
ryandrake|3 years ago
The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.
laidoffamazon|3 years ago
[deleted]
ceres|3 years ago
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!
jasode|3 years ago
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.
jghn|3 years ago
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.
unity1001|3 years ago
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.
jqpabc123|3 years ago
Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
noasaservice|3 years ago
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.
e_i_pi_2|3 years ago
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.
winternett|3 years ago
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.
cmurf|3 years ago
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.
risyachka|3 years ago
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.
boh|3 years ago
So just group chats.
barbazoo|3 years ago
seydor|3 years ago
It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers
EGreg|3 years ago
mtkhaos|3 years ago
drcongo|3 years ago
SanjayMehta|3 years ago
fullshark|3 years ago
nopenopenopeno|3 years ago
Exactly. Landlords should not exist.
ransom1538|3 years ago
Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.
LanceJones|3 years ago
samwillis|3 years ago
macspoofing|3 years ago
davewritescode|3 years ago
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.
cwkoss|3 years ago
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.
pessimizer|3 years ago
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?
InCityDreams|3 years ago
Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?
VikingCoder|3 years ago
There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.
halfmatthalfcat|3 years ago
Nifty3929|3 years ago
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.
nitin-pai|3 years ago
What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse.
[1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
colesantiago|3 years ago
I know it's optional, just curious about their motives for data collection.
SilverBirch|3 years ago
costcofries|3 years ago
duxup|3 years ago
harel|3 years ago
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...
mgdev|3 years ago
Entinel|3 years ago
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.
macspoofing|3 years ago
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.
Jerry2|3 years ago
Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard.
[1] https://instances.social/
standardUser|3 years ago
Entinel|3 years ago
TheRealPomax|3 years ago
WC3w6pXxgGd|3 years ago
[deleted]
mattdesl|3 years ago
I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others:
https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
desireco42|3 years ago
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.
hengestone|3 years ago
_fizz_buzz_|3 years ago
jwmoz|3 years ago
afhammad|3 years ago
https://t2.social/
vannevar|3 years ago
barbazoo|3 years ago
adastra22|3 years ago
So, not Twitter. The 240-char limit of Twitter is really essential to its eclectic dynamic.
globalise83|3 years ago
racl101|3 years ago
Finnucane|3 years ago
biggerChris|3 years ago
afhammad|3 years ago
orthecreedence|3 years ago
hn2017|3 years ago
Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.
aaron_m04|3 years ago
That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.
seydor|3 years ago
whitelabrat|3 years ago
dqpb|3 years ago
> 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?
lbriner|3 years ago
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.
7952|3 years ago
dqpb|3 years ago
phendrenad2|3 years ago
fourstar|3 years ago
No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.
jqpabc123|3 years ago
bedhead|3 years ago
dale_glass|3 years ago
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.
standardUser|3 years ago
KerrAvon|3 years ago
[deleted]
bogwog|3 years ago
...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.
macspoofing|3 years ago
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).
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
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.
mikeryan|3 years ago
ss108|3 years ago
No lol, wtf is he talking about