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There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - v

There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - very hard to get traction against deep pocketed and connected rivals. Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them

eropple 10y ago
> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. Launch, sure. Scale? That's a much harder problem in terms of user acquisition (and if you can do that, you can deal with the technical side of things even as a nonprofit, maybe). I think there's only room for one Twitter. If you don't have 99% of the people interested in that sort of service, you might as well have nobody. And I don't think the arguments towards federation and distribution help--you can have a thousand federated hosts, and if you have no users, you will get no users. It's a really hard problem.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Existing and being architecturally scalable while Twitter is failing or as it fails should be enough to get users.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.
sosborn 10y ago
> Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them It will be bought eventually. Everyone is just waiting for the price to come down, which is inevitable.
zanny 10y ago
We already have the ostatus protocol / and GNUSocial as the open replacement to Twitter. The reason it doesn't win is because Twitter has all the users. If Twitter became an OStatus node and was interoperable with the GNUSocial network it would basically be a second smtp in terms of universality of information conveyance.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  OStatus appears to be de facto deprecated. The new hotness is evidently pump.io, JSON Activity Streams, and the W3C Social Web Working Group [1]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG
sukilot 10y ago
status.net already launched . No one has heard of it
dredmorbius 10y ago
NB: Craigslist isn't a non-profit. It's a for-profit corporation, privately held, despite the .org registration.

eropple 10y ago

> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. Launch, sure. Scale? That's a much harder problem in terms of user acquisition (and if you can do that, you can deal with the technical side of things even as a nonprofit, maybe). I think there's only room for one Twitter. If you don't have 99% of the people interested in that sort of service, you might as well have nobody. And I don't think the arguments towards federation and distribution help--you can have a thousand federated hosts, and if you have no users, you will get no users. It's a really hard problem.

pessimizer 10y ago
Existing and being architecturally scalable while Twitter is failing or as it fails should be enough to get users.
- eropple 10y ago
  Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.

sosborn 10y ago

> Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them It will be bought eventually. Everyone is just waiting for the price to come down, which is inevitable.

zanny 10y ago

We already have the ostatus protocol / and GNUSocial as the open replacement to Twitter. The reason it doesn't win is because Twitter has all the users. If Twitter became an OStatus node and was interoperable with the GNUSocial network it would basically be a second smtp in terms of universality of information conveyance.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
OStatus appears to be de facto deprecated. The new hotness is evidently pump.io, JSON Activity Streams, and the W3C Social Web Working Group [1]. [1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG https://www.w3.org/Social/WG

sukilot 10y ago

status.net already launched . No one has heard of it

dredmorbius 10y ago

NB: Craigslist isn't a non-profit. It's a for-profit corporation, privately held, despite the .org registration.