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That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became. I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became. I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine). I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible? You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

btrask 11y ago
Twitter should be a dumb pipe. Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users. [1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
- tangled_zans 11y ago
  I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.
Nadya 11y ago
>You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work? GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757
- tangled_zans 11y ago
  Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off. While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it. Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data. So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else. Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section. That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.

btrask 11y ago

Twitter should be a dumb pipe. Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users. [1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

tangled_zans 11y ago
I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.

Nadya 11y ago

>You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work? GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757

tangled_zans 11y ago
Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off. While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it. Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data. So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else. Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section. That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.