Ask HN: What's Going to Replace Twitter?

[CM30]

When Musk first bought Twitter, I basically joined every single alternative that popped up. Mastodon, Hive, Post, Cohost, etc... if they exist, I've probably got an account on them now.

And I kinda expected people to move over after that. People were all making a big deal out of it, and there was a lot of interest in leaving the site after whatever questionable decision was made that week (Twitter Blue, the timeline kerfuffle, controversial accounts being unbanned, mentions of Mastodon and co being banned, etc).

Yet for whatever reason, no one seems to have stuck to that. Most of these places have communities, but the vast majority of people are either still on Twitter or keep posting there as their primary social media service.

So what will it take to actually replace it outright? To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg or Facebook killed Myspace?

[nh23423fefe]

Those other places need to be better than Twitter.

> I kinda expected people to move

Why did you have this expectation? If you are big on Twitter why move and lose your audience? To "punish" Musk? That's absurd echo chamber, wishful thinking. If you are just a regular Twitter addict with no following why leave? To be alone and feel superior on weak clone?

There's nothing wrong with Twitter run by Musk. It's just as shitty as it always was. The UI was always shit, the 37/N threads were always full of trash and should probably just be a blog anyway. But people want the comment section dopamine rush of twitter.

[jpamata]

None. The era of 1-1 social media is gone, it's now 1-many.

Especially for the younger generations, they dont tend to stay and invest their time building profiles in just one or two social media, they use it all. There's no such dedicated efforts to "move." Only what is popular and trendy.

[hitpointdrew]

I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.

Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand. You are either looking for an echo chamber that is tightly censored like twitter used to be (congrats on keeping your ignorance and refusing to listen to the other side all while virtue signaling how open and tolerant you are, when really you are just blowing smoke up your own ass), or you are going to end up a platform that has hardly any censorship at all and allows all the shit you are so mad about that is now back on Twitter.

>To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg

Reddit didn't kill Digg, Digg shot themselves in the head.

[angoragoats]

Mastodon doesn't necessarily have less moderation, it just has a different set of knobs to tweak to accomplish the act of moderation.

The decentralized/federated architecture makes it simple for admins of instances to ban whichever other instances they see fit. In practice, this means that it's effectively easier to ban unsavory users of certain undesirable types, since they tend to congregate on the same instances.

On top of that, there are traditional ban controls at both the user and admin level.

I've been a Mastodon user since 2017 and I've found it pretty good with respect to moderation and unwanted content. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the instances I've chosen, though.

[snhly]

Mastodon has way more moderation than Twitter, actually. And way better moderation, too. Rather than one universal moderation rulebook there is one set of rules for each instance. And the moderators themselves? In Mastodon land it's members of the community itself, not some poor peon who hates their life and has no connection to the community. I.e. Mastodon uses the original forum moderator model. Don't like the moderation rules? Move instance. (Mastodon makes it easy to do this while maintaining most of your followers). Instance getting too big to moderate? Redirect registrants to some other instance, or assign more moderators from your own community. It's grassroots. It works. It draws from a culture of moderation and community that has existed for thousands of years. Twitter's global town hall doesn't work. No global town hall has ever worked. Empires, monopolies, despots, all sooner or later crumble. Even with a few periods of one-size-fits-all thinking, technology and society always tends towards smaller, interoperable units (think email, phone networks, balkanisation, the web at large, the massive tree of human languages). It may take 5-10 years, but twitter will either fall or get broken down into a federated service itself.

[rvz]

> I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.

It's even more hilarious that the false predictions like this one [0] and exaggerations of Twitter completely collapsing didn't happen.

> Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand.

Well, only the techies here are still pretending that Mastodon is a viable replacement to Twitter when Mastodon is the one losing users [1] because of the same fundamental issues, including less moderation - A inefficient and worse version of Discord.

Just wait until some instances get bought out by companies because of the number of users a 'moderator' has under their belt to sell the instance over. [2] So much for 'Social networking that's not for sale.".

The 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still didn't care to move to something even worse.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...

[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...

[dahdum]

Headliners like to play to the big crowds and Twitter is by far the biggest stage. Unless you can attract celebrities, politicians, heads of state, athletes, musicians, and others with large audiences the platforms will stay niche.

I'm highly doubtful any Twitter-like platform could succeed in the next 5-10 years. You need entirely new experiences to attract people.

[throwayyy479087]

Nothing - the staying power of Twitter is that public figures/celebrities/politicians use it. They use it because that's where the audience is. It's the definition of a path dependent product, and probably can't be recreated in a similar form.

For messagebus style social media? TikTok.

[tomjen3]

Nobody wants to use a site that does not have a big audience.

All the ones I have seen are not even 1/10 of Twitter size so your potential reach is tiny.

Not to mention mastodon is too complicated to sign up for.

[krapp]

Most people using Twitter aren't professionals whose primary interest is capturing as many eyeballs as possible - and almost none of the pros are actually reaching a significant fraction of Twitter, anyway. The fact that people are leaving Twitter for Mastodon proves other motivations can be just as effective as "reach."

Also, "too complicated" is a reach on a site full of people who deal with the arcane bullshit of programming all day. It isn't that difficult. At a minimum, pick an instance and fill out a form on their website (eg: https://mastodon.social/) and bookmark each one. Or get any third-party client. Plenty of "non-technical" people have figured it out.

[smoldesu]

Nothing, ostensibly. Do you think all the hot-ticket celebrities, brand accounts, political figures and self-made Twitter moguls are ever going to leave Twitter? If they do, it's because they're taking back that publishing power for themselves. If they don't... it's tacit recognition that Twitter "won". You want a TikTok-style microblog feed that nobody wants to offer.

People won't ever "move over". You can either use the protocol you like with the people that interest you, or use the platform that people are on. I say this harshly because I like Mastodon and I'm tired of people assuming that things will ever 'go back to normal'. Your idea of 'normal' is giving one party universal power over everyone, and if we make that same mistake again then we deserve another Elon Musk situation.

[hpen]

Bro are you sure musk is so much worse as a human than whoever was running twitter before? I bet he's just more popular

[celtoid]

Nostr is waiting in the wings. It will be a real threat to Twitter, FB and all of the SV social apps in a year or two, imo. Development is increasing by the week. Nostr clients also have something that Twitter, FB and other SV platforms lack: a built in payment system.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

[angoragoats]

The nostr protocol is very interesting but every time I try to start using it, I'm turned off by the payment system stuff, or at least by a lot of the publicly advertised relays being associated with cryptocurrency. Though I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to wrt "a built in payment system."

For example, if you go to coracle.social right now and go to the page to add relays, I see names like "wss://btc.klendazu.com" or "wss://nostr.ethtozero.fr". It seems (perhaps through no fault of the protocol developers) that it's becoming associated with cryptocurrency and it makes me not want to use it.

edit: I added a few relays that didn't seem to have cryptocurrency-associated names, and the messages I've gotten so far all look like bots reporting status about cryptocurrency mining, or transfer of tokens, or some other nonsense.

[rcarr]

If they hurry up and release a microblogging feature, then I think it will be Substack.

[learningstud]

GitHub issues