26 ms·

Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

• sublinear 4y ago
  Twitter is now too big to fail and paid verification is a very smart business move. Those displaced by the changes will just move to platforms that are a better fit. I don't see what the problem is.
  • thebradbain 4y ago
    Twitter is not too big to fail, and I say that as someone who has used twitter daily since 2011.
• seydor 4y ago
  forums
• valeg 4y ago
  There is nothing that can compare with this addictive ticker. A huge and lindy network effect.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  There are probably 100 twitter alternatives and none are close to replacing it . Hard to say but does not look promising.
  • tkk23 4y ago
    Those 100 alternatives, if they had settled on a protocol, that protocol could have become the standard and could have motivated Twitter and Facebook to join. Each alternative could have coexisted in that environment. I would like to know why neither ActivityPub nor the Matrix protocol were adopted. Maybe https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/ will gain the necessary momentum.
• DisorgRel 4y ago
  People are still using twitter…? Steve Inskeep of NPR nailed it on Up First when he started his report “Hard to say what the media mogul [Musk] will do with the site that most people do not use but which has a huge influence over news coverage.” (Fri, Oct 28). My bet is on TikTok, where millions of people already prefer to spend their time.
  • textadventure 4y ago
    Yes, people are still using Twitter. TikTok is a very different thing, it's not a replacement for Twitter.
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    Just to be blunt about it, the people whose opinions matter are obsessed with Twitter, not TikTok.
    • riffic 4y ago
      that's kind of dismissive.
      • bpodgursky 4y ago
        Yes, I am aware. But at the end of the day, Musk and Biden and just about anyone with power or money you can actually name have Twitter accounts, not TikToks.
        • DisorgRel 4y ago
          “On Friday, the theater publication Playbill also said it would stop posting to its Twitter account, which has 412,000 followers. It said it would focus its social media efforts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.” -Nyt. I suspect others will be joining this trend…
• MBCook 4y ago
  None. The power of Twitter is the people there. The huge network effects. If people leave Twitter, they’re not all going to go to the same place. They’ll go to different places or give up on the concept all together. It’s irreplaceable. It’s an artifact of a very different time. I don’t think it can ever be recreated.
  • x86hacker1010 4y ago
    Let’s revisit this comment in 5 years.
    • IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
      I think OP and you can both be right. Twitter may shrink and even disappear in 5 years. But that doesn't mean it will be ever be replaced by any 1 thing.
    • mayankkaizen 4y ago
      Twitter might be dead in few years. But it doesn't mean some other Twitter clone would have replaced Twitter. People like novelty. People would migrate to other venues which will be novel rather than to Twitter clones. In current scenario, nothing is going to 'replace' Twitter. Think about TikTok. It is sort of killing FB. But is it FB replacement? No.
      • capeterson 4y ago
        Conversely, maybe some Twitter clone does replace Twitter! Using TikTok as your example, it killed Triller which was (and still is) moderately popular. Even further, Triller was mostly just an iteration of Vine. Vine was definitely the first of line though, I can't think of any earlier mobile-first video sharing social media platforms.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      I wanted to add a note since I see my comment didn’t mention something. I think Twitter is a dead man walking. Maybe 6 months. Maybe 3 years. I don’t think it will survive. Wanted to add that clarification.
• eimrine 4y ago
  For me the biggest value of Twitter is that some celebrities are using it. So, media they choose will be a new big thing. But I would like them to use some kind of Blockchain-powered source because what celebrities publish is history sometimes.
• mradek 4y ago
  I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a software company, and just being honest I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far. If I do, maybe I become someone important in my field or part of launching some important project/company, then maybe I could be invited to Twitter. Kind of like those high end credit cards that one has to be invited to based on their income/asset level. Then again, I have no idea how that would make money (besides showing ads to followers like me) so I'm back to just following those important people for now lol. No way I'm paying money to view twitter, I'm cutting down on how much I spend on these monthly subscription services.
  • riffic 4y ago
    verification has always been an arbitrary label, placed upon an account by someone inside Twitter (generally because they like you).
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      sort of. that also happens. check marks look tied to popularity, leading one to wonder why arbitrarily less popular accounts have check marks. "it couldn't be anything besides connections could it?" its natural to wonder that way. the reason exceptions to popularity resulted in blue checkmarks is because the popularity was only a correlation. the likelihood of your account being impersonated is a primary driver of verification. so impersonation is the cause, this is correlated to a desire to want to impersonate which is tied to popularity, but nobody needs to be popular to be impersonated. there is also a way to game that by... causing the impersonation yourself. I would say that its coincidence people place any desire and covet on verification. Without that, the 'controversy' disappears and it is replaced by utility and consumer protection.
  • whateveracct 4y ago
    Blue check has like 0 moat.
• acomjean 4y ago
  Mastodon. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ But people go where people are, so we’ll see if it gets traction.
  • Tozen 4y ago
    Problem is Mastodon has been around since 2016. It's got some attention, but never to the level that it could challenge Twitter. Reminds me of challengers to YouTube. Some YouTube challengers like Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, etc... have got some media attention and hype, and have done OK, but just not at the level where it can be seen as a replacement. Get the feeling that Mastodon is in the same category, in comparison to Twitter.
    • easrng 4y ago
      tbh I'd rather it didn't try to replace twitter, it works fine the way it is for me
  • collegeburner 4y ago
    mastadon is nothing even remotely close to a "culture fit" for most normal people outside a few very select bubbles.
    • seba_dos1 4y ago
      As if Twitter was in its early years...
      • pavlov 4y ago
        Arguably Twitter still doesn’t have mass-market culture fit outside a few bubbles. User growth has long been stuck. Their recent study shows that active users drop off at an alarming rate.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • 4y ago
• tayo42 4y ago
  If Instagram had better text post support, I think everyone would just go there. They basically are already. Bands and companies promote them selves there already more frequently. Stories let people already share their stupid political hot tales. Honestly not sure what Twitter has over Instagram. Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made Maybe reddit, but seeing how their new ui is going I doubt they have the right people to make decisions there Also, Twitter was is already dieing naturally. I don't think people actually want more Twitter
  • lupire 4y ago
    Instagram is mostly softcore porn. People who don't want that don't want to hang out there.
    • tayo42 4y ago
      The content you see Instagram is up to you. I don't get any of that. Clean up what you follow! Lol
      • Tozen 4y ago
        Maybe soft porn is a bit of a reach or possibly not the best way to describe it, but it does seem people come for the visuals, not the text. Instagram comes off as much more sexualized (even if indirectly) and female oriented.
        • alphabettsy 4y ago
          Again, this is all about what you interact with. I don’t see that.
          • theragra 4y ago
            Agree. I see posts from my.friends, NASA, ESA, hikers. The only soft porn account is porn actress i specifically subscribed to
• riffic 4y ago
  the federated social web built upon ActivityPub, merely because it can not be put back inside the bottle. There will come along something more usable and interesting than Mastodon but talking the same standardized language for interoperability.
  • lupire 4y ago
    Why hasn't it been created yet?
    • tough 4y ago
      Let's do it. What do you think it needs to have or be? Momentum is important, Musk irrumped now. Lots of minds are -thinking- about change. One could leverage that into springbooting something new
    • riffic 4y ago
      it already exists
• xnx 4y ago
  TikTok is most likely to become the first mega app (what Elmo has stated he wants to create as X) that's popular in the US.
  • the_jesus_villa 4y ago
    >TikTok is most likely to become the first mega app Why is this likely? Seems like it just does one thing well, and even that one thing now has serious competition from Youtube shorts (which are kinda better). Plus it's not cool anymore. Facebook seems to want to be a mega app but no one cares and it's just not happening because Facebook is a dinosaur. Twitter very likely won't become Elon's X app, but I think TikTok is even less likely.
    • tkk23 4y ago
      >Twitter very likely won't become Elon's X app, Elon has experience with Paypal. Payment and identity management is the core ingredient for an X app. Twitter gives him the user base, and he has overspent enough that everybody is aware of Twitter to easily acquire new users. Somehow it became normal that big companies don't role out new features very often. That's not a given. Elon can reshape Twitter and turn its NASA-like development structure into a SpaceX structure. If Twitter runs like a startup it could be reshaped within months. However, Elon could also create something like the Vegas tunnel which supposedly doesn't have the safety features to handle a fire very well. [1] [1] https://reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/yeni5w/elons_boring_tunnel/ https://reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/yeni5w/elons_boring_t...
  • MisterSandman 4y ago
    I highly highly doubt this. TikTok was a new idea and targeted young people. It has no brand value or widespread cultural support for it to be able to expand into other types of social media. Pretty much every TikTok creator hates the monetization and many are shifting focus to YouTube.
    • samplatt 4y ago
      Interesting. I was under the impression that YouTube creators hate the lack of transparent moderation and have been moving to other platforms - often, like TikTok.
• oliyoung 4y ago
  I want it to be Mastodon I think it'll be TikTok
  • DesiLurker 4y ago
    Mastodon needs a patron to host & manage the site. but somebody who can avoid mission creep and the strong lure of tracking & ad dollars. maybe if craigslist folks can do a bare minimal version with just good enough content discovery algos they may be able to. but you do need a big name for people to start gravitating towards it when twitter screws up (& screw up it will!).
  • valeg 4y ago
    Mastodon should stop mimicking Twitter (or TweetDeck, to be precise) and go for the internet forum revival.
    • fomine3 4y ago
      It should be done by different protocol/software
• thinkmcfly 4y ago
  I'm sure it won't be mastadon
  • riffic 4y ago
    masto not masta
    • thinkmcfly 4y ago
      Ah well idk what's gonna happen with mastodon
• saperyton 4y ago
  Surprised not to be hearing more about Tumblr. It's got the infrastructure... it would just need to develop a more serious vibe.
  • razetime 4y ago
    I don't remember twitter having a serious vibe. It's a mess of vibes. Tumblr is also a big mess, but more on the goofy side. I don't think it would change much even with a twitter diaspora.
  • easrng 4y ago
    Tumblr users wouldn't let that happen.
• ck2 4y ago
  It's going to be a free-for-all wild-west like the early 2000s again. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog Twitter's only power was "eyeballs" and now there are going to be a dozen sites trying to take a cut of that. (how on earth Twitter is going to make $1 Billion/year to pay financing is beyond my grasp)
• a-user-you-like 4y ago
  Gab is doing well and growing all the time.
  • HKH2 4y ago
    I think it will only ever attract right wingers. Maybe they consider that a feature.
  • emaro 4y ago
    Gab is Mastodon is Fediverse. Although Gab is not very federated, since almost all admins of other ActivityPub servers have blocked them.
• MangoCoffee 4y ago
  the story about missile strikes on Ukraine pop up last night on Twitter via BBC News's tweet. you can get the latest news/tweet from on the ground reporters. i don't know which social media platform can give me this type of update.
  • dendrite9 4y ago
    It does feel like that but I also have noticed breaking news sources being posted from Wechat, FB and tiktok recently. Some of that is through twitter though, so you might be right. I am trying to remember what happened with the switch between myspace and facebook, that felt like nothing could change where the attention was until all of the sudden it felt inevitable.
    • awb 4y ago
      In the early days Facebook was invite only as select colleges were onboarded so it had an allure to it. Kind of like Clubhouse did. I remember kids had two profiles, MySpace and Facebook and you’d qualify wether you saw a post or messaged someone on which platform. Eventually, the center of gravity switched to Facebook and people stopped maintaining their MySpace accounts.
  • weberer 4y ago
    Any RSS reader like 20 years ago. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494
• nurettin 4y ago
  I'm hoping it would not get replaced. There are no mannerisms at all. For example: HN tries to cultivate intelligent posts full of information, fosstodon looks for kind, easygoing posts. Twitter looks for (and finds) the worst kind of sarcasm and toxicity. Self-moderation is discouraged, because it is not a site-wide rule.
• gexla 4y ago
  Every network is unique, I don't think you could ever replace Twitter. Anything not Twitter is going to be different. Twitter itself is constantly changing. A better question might be, what are you CURRENTLY using as a place to find communities (if this is what you're looking for) outside of Twitter? Answers to this question are going to be the most useful. Every community is unique. FB is useless to me for most things, but there are some communities which thrive in FB groups. Some communities have a thriving Discord, other communities in adjacent domains might be more into Slack. Finding the right spots requires a bit of hunting. Reddit is great for some communities, dead to others. What I like about Twitter vs any other network tool, is the random interesting stuff I can come across which is still somewhat related to people I follow. I don't see that replaced by any other platform. Niche places have more utility in some ways, but less randomness.
• skybrian 4y ago
  You can have a blog anywhere, but to promote it to people who aren’t subscribers, you’ll likely still want to post links to Twitter, and maybe other places too. It may make sense to treat Twitter solely as a way of advertising content hosted elsewhere. Thinking about where you might post a link, Hacker News and Facebook and Reddit can sometimes work, when appropriate. It seems unlikely that Twitter will stop being a good place to do this?
  • onion2k 4y ago
    That makes no sense. Posting on a site only makes sense if people who are interested in your content are reading it. If no one is reading Twitter (eg everyone has left) then posting links there won't drive any traffic to your blog.
    • skybrian 4y ago
      Maybe traffic will start going down, but people aren’t going to stop reading Twitter all at once.
• afinlayson 4y ago
  It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest problem with Twitter is it's easily manipulated. Small groups of people can pretend to be large groups by making a small topic tend. We act like likes are votes, but anyone can create multiple accounts .... Imagine if we did democracy this way ....
  • tobyjsullivan 4y ago
    The way the Internet is built, it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to ever tell if a client app is being operated by a human or a bot. There are various ways to make automation harder, and there are heuristics to guess if the operator might be a bot, but neither are absolute. The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost certainly not true. (Think about Snapchat's "no screenshot implementation" as a real-world parallel.) The only bots on the platform would be the most nefarious actors who are willing to invest in the arms race. Any platform that solves this problem will have to take a different approach - probably assuming there are bots and then providing tools to allow humans to only interact with other humans they can reasonably trust.
    • alias_neo 4y ago
      You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down; My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion. This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn't imagine a social platform holding the crown jewels like this ever not being a disaster.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• nothrowaways 4y ago
  A new instance of Twitter.
  • gnicholas 4y ago
    Call it Nitter, for short.
    • ArcMex 4y ago
      Have you ever heard of Chirper?
• progfix 4y ago
  I saw a couple of people move to cohost.org. Some people are moving to Mastodon.
• analogtom 4y ago
  Bluesky
• analogtom 4y ago
  Bluesky, Dorsey’s new platform.
  • shafyy 4y ago
    Exactly. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better from a technological standpoint than other open social media protocols [0], but the fact that it's somehow tied to Twitter changes things. If Twitter chooses to switch to an open protocol, it will likely be Blue Sky. And based on my understanding of the texts between Elon and Jack, Elon is open to the open protocol idea [1]. Btw, you can sign up for their own client for Blue Sky here (beta waitlist): https://bsky.app/ https://bsky.app/ 0: https://atproto.com https://atproto.com 1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-muskp https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...
• xeonmc 4y ago
  If Matrix.org adds a dedicated “user feed” feature for public facing timeline then it could slowly gain traction. The protocol and infrastructure is already there, just need to build functionality on top.
• ulfw 4y ago
  I know no one wants to hear this but... Facebook. It does the same thing. With less character limit, more functionality and equally huge (actually bigger) user base. Sure we can all go and re-invent the wheel for the 800th time (I am still fond of my ex company myspace!) but if you just want to move away from twitter TODAY there's Facebook (and instagram)
• throw_m239339 4y ago
  Nothing is going to replace Twitter. thankfully. We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups. Centralization needs to end. Twitter barely made any money and VC aren't willing to invest in these projects, again.
  • samtho 4y ago
    > We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups. We had this, but those days are gone. Forums used to reign supreme but was killed by a small number of centralized players. Due to the power of the network effect, I don’t see us going back to stand-alone forums anymore, unfortunately. I am skeptical about a federated system of individually managed instances due to the fact that all it takes is some minor inactivity/inaction on the part of the operator to render the service down for the count. I would love to be proved wrong on this.
• Quindecillion 4y ago
  There's the nostr protocol that could be a good censorship resistant decentralised alternative [1] Jack Dorsey (ex-Twitter CEO) is also working on a protocol with similar properties [2] Neither can really replace Twitter right now, but they're interesting alternatives coming down the pipeline. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr [2] https://blueskyweb.org/ https://blueskyweb.org/
  • blacklight 4y ago
    ActivityPub has been around for much longer. I consider Nostr and Bluesky rip offs of what ActivityPub has been trying to build for more than a decade.
    • klabb3 4y ago
      From AT protocol (bluesky) FAQ: > Why not use ActivityPub? > [...] Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements.
      • Ambolia 4y ago
        I like the Nostr approach where "the data IS the network". It is true that their current approach of having "relays" as their main distribution system is not that censor resistant, but once you have that "network in the data" it is trivial to switch at any point to swapping encrypted files or even USB-sticks with your friends if you want. Has ActivityPub anything similar? Edit: and this is not just important for distribution, but for archiving. How many interesting Twitter threads and Youtube videos have been lost in the ether unless you manually archived them? And even if you archived it nobody can't tell if they are the same as the originals. With Nostr you can solve this with clients that do archiving automatically, and all the links stay "fresh" and shareable as long as somebody keeps the data.
      • blitzar 4y ago
        > Why not use ActivityPub? Because we want it to be open and free - but we think we should be the ones that owns it.
• okuntilnow 4y ago
  Personally, I don’t think we need a twitter replacement. Mastodon is nice, but ultimately suffers from the same problems but at smaller scale. I think it’s more likely that users will move to smaller communities - Discord, Telegram & WhatsApp groups etc. I’m surprised that Whatsapp hasn’t developed better community functions.
  • benjaminwootton 4y ago
    There is so much potential in WhatsApp. With a few baby steps they could move into the Discord/Slack space, Telegram channels, Twitter type interactions etc. And that’s before you get into a WeChat everything-app. I’m not saying to add it all and change what makes WhatsApp good, but it could encompass a lot more social stuff (with small groups being the niche) and it’s absolutely ubiquitous. It could also be a cash cow for Meta.
    • reacharavindh 4y ago
      WeChat keeps coming up every so often. I have never used it, most certainly not in China where it seems to be intended for. How does it work? Apple as far as I see in EU does not allow an app to be an "everything app" and holds tight control even over updates being shipped. I also see iPhones are wildly popular in China.. So, how does WeChat get its everything functionality in china?
      • Barrin92 4y ago
        it pretty much works the same way it does on Android because Apple just doesn't really enforce its App Store rules. Chinese users heavily indicate that they'd switch to Android if WeChat would suck. So the short answer is, Tencent has enough leverage. Also iphone share still isn't that big, like 20% of the market I think.
• yellow_lead 4y ago
  I think that Twitter's problem is more bots, shills, and manipulation than centralization. I would like to see another centralized platform which takes bots more seriously with maybe some other features like up/down vote, rather than just "likes."
  • tomcam 4y ago
    I think the new owner agrees with you
• tester756 4y ago
  I hope none I'd rather have people divide into smaller sites, forums, news aggregators Just to see how it'd work
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  In the case it dies I don't think the users will go to a particular social media. Some will go use different social networks, some will use nothing instead and will find other ways to consume their time.
• samwillis 4y ago
  Picks any two of these three, I don't believe it's possible to do all three: 1. Decentralised 2. No Spam/manipulation 3. No censorship (The boundary between what is classed as manipulation, and what shouldn't be censored will never be solved)
  • infofarmer 4y ago
    email does all three reasonably well
    • weberer 4y ago
      Email does not do #2 well at all.
      • infofarmer 4y ago
        if you don't look at SMTP alone, but at the whole suite of protocols and best practices, email spam has been a solved problem for over a decade compared to my gmail, protonmail and other email clients/services, the signal-to-spam ratio on Twitter is less than 10% even for me — a nobody with <1k followers
  • impossiblefork 4y ago
    I think it's the opposite, and that all these can easily be achieved together. Instead I believe that the difficulties with running social media companies come from not wanting these: there's a desire to control narratives, to push advertisements and to have central control. If these are the requirements the result is a behemoth of a company, which must do a great deal. Meanwhile, if you have something noncommercial, where you just want some kind of forum where people can communicate with you and others, you can let them filter as they like, turning the knob down on any kind of spam-- because the user is running their machine and getting the benefit of the communication they desire, there is no need for any centralized control of the information flow-- the user decides what he sees, nor any need for advertisements, and because of the absence of advertisements there is no need for censorship or control in that regard. Furthermore, because messages are public the difficulties with dealing with things like e-mail spam disappear-- you will simply see what people think about a certain message, and you will not decide to see it if people in the tree of people you like like it. I think internet technology is ready for this kind of thing. It's a bit of work though. To make a distributed WebRTC-Reddit where even people on phones can contribute to the communications network is a bit of work, but, I think, no longer infeasible.
• awareness_rofl 4y ago
  Lens protocol: lenster.xyz
• blacklight 4y ago
  Millions have been using the Fediverse for years, I haven't looked back for the past two years myself. It's built on open protocols and it's multi-platform by definition. You can even follow your Twitter accounts from Mastodon. So what exactly are you folks waiting for, and why do I have to keep hearing the "is there an alternative to social network X" question every couple of days? Just jump on any Mastodon instance, invite others to do the same, and let's stop whining.
  • Gordonjcp 4y ago
    There are three problems with Mastodon: 1) It's hard to get on it, unless you know someone who is running an instance. 2) No-one I know is on it, and can't get on it since they don't know anyone running an instance. 3) The people who are on it all have names like xXxFuchsSturm1488xXx and think I want to see a constant rolling feed of politically-orientated furry pr0n.
    • amatecha 4y ago
      Use this[0] to find an instance that has rules/topics you resonate with. No need to subject yourself to mastodon.social. [0] https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/
    • blacklight 4y ago
      1. I run my own instance, and it's not that hard to set up and get connected to other instances. Those that don't want to run their own instance usually either join an existing instance (there are about 10k servers out there), or just join mastodon.social (and that's where most people are anyways). 2. When I joined I didn't know anybody either, but in a short time I connected to a lot of new interesting people. Now I have my own bots to relay content from people that are still on Twitter, and I have my own organic circle of followers - that's almost the best of the two worlds. 3. Muting profiles (and, even better, instances) is a good way of getting rid of a lot of spam/undesired content.
      • Gordonjcp 4y ago
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  Lots of people are on Telegram nowadays but then I follow a lot of Russian and Ukrainian sources so that’s why. It’s very popular there. I still don’t know how they make money though. It’s shady.
  • imgabe 4y ago
    I keep hearing about people getting information from Telegram, but when I open it, it's just a list of chats with my contacts. I don't see any way to follow or otherwise see posts from people I don't already know that are just broadcast out to the general public. Am I missing something?
    • Ambolia 4y ago
      You can search for "public channels", but you need to enter the exact name, or get a link to them.
    • weberer 4y ago
      There are news channels which pretty much work like RSS feeds. They show up in your chat list with a megaphone next to their name. https://t.me/linuxgram https://t.me/linuxgram https://t.me/PINE64_News https://t.me/PINE64_News https://t.me/hacker_news_feed https://t.me/hacker_news_feed
  • theragra 4y ago
    Telegram has premium and ads now
• holler 4y ago
  Author here of Sqwok, it's a hybrid microblog/public chat app meant for having live public conversation around a topic. Each post has a chatroom instead of comments, with expected chat features and more. Not trying to build a Twitter or X replacement, just a quality place for live discussion. https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
• cpach 4y ago
  Discord and/or Slack.
• thom 4y ago
  I would suggest just logging off. The healthiest periods of my life, both mentally and physically, have come during Twitter hiatuses, and I’m permanently off now. I read books. I buy a physical newspaper. I am not angry and anxious all the time. Life is good out there.
• remarkEon 4y ago
  The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're at. Journalists, politicians, business people, elites more generally etc. all use this thing to coordinate what they think about basically everything. So you're really asking "how do I create another semi-public elite coordination system that could step in if Twitter falls apart".
  • blitzar 4y ago
    wtf is an "elite" anyway? The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me? The politicians ... but not the ones on my side? The athletes ... except for my team?
    • Jenk 4y ago
      What a completely pointless and banal digression into divisive politics when nobody asked for it.
      • blitzar 4y ago
        But what the fuck is an "Elite" anyway?
        • hkt 4y ago
          I think rather than dragging a HN thread off topic it may be beneficial for you to read about the topics - both the HN post and the idea of elites as it pertains to your question. Sorry to be a killjoy.
        • ema 4y ago
          The elite is the part of society who either through happenstance or personality are in the center of it fulfilling are coordinating role. This does mean that they have an outsize influence on society and also are at risk of becoming out of touch with the periphery. This fuels anti elite sentiment. At the same time because everyone talking to everyone doesn't scale we can't do without an elite. Also many members of the elite do have genuinely excellent qualities. This fuels pro elite sentiment. Because many people want to only consider either the pro or anti side of it there is a lot of confused discussion about the elite.
• _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Never had a twitter account and never will. Twitter doesn't need a replacement. Maybe this will lead to the people who spend all day arguing about trivial BS on twitter to actually touch grass for once. And then get rid of the other attention parasite bullshit sites TT, FB, Reddit, etc.
• ryzvonusef 4y ago
  how about we don't fall into mass hysteria and wait? People don't move from platforms, they drift away naturally. I didn't move away from slashdot, I just found reddit suited my needs and naturally visited the site less and less. and then, I didn't move from reddit to HN, I just used reddit less and less until I realized HN fit my niche more. I still have my slashdot account, but it's been unused since 2014 with reddit, I deleted my account in a fit of depression... but hilariously I still visit the site regularly (much easier to track my various entertainments there), i just no longer comment there. ---- I don't user Instagram because, I just don't... get it? Too old for it. I deleted Facebook when I realized all my extended family was on it and I just didn't to see them on social media. Who knows how I'll fare with Twitter. I rarely tweet (honestly, because I am afraid of speaking on the platform, public speech is dangerous in my country) but I regularly use it, because where else will I get my instant updates? So I will go where the updates are.
  • combyn8tor 4y ago
    > People don't move from platforms, they drift away naturally. Digg has entered the chat.
    • ryzvonusef 4y ago
      somehow I skipped Digg altogether. Like I knew the site existed, but simply didn't enter my sphere of browsing.
      • o_m 4y ago
        The point combyn8tor is trying to make is that there was an exodus from Digg to Reddit and it happened rapidly. Digg didn't fade away as others did.
        • ryzvonusef 4y ago
          I know, but as some one who was a spectator to the drift, I feel it was an outlier. There are always people threatening to move, but rarely does it happen (remember Voat?) Digg is an outlier IMHO.
• danbmil99 4y ago
  Your use of the word "site" implies that Federated systems like Mastodon and Matrix can never fulfill their promise. I think the last thing we want is another site owned and controlled by a for-profit company.
• INTPenis 4y ago
  I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure. It might not replace twitter, but it might actually turn the entire internet into one big social media federation. My mind keeps putting ActivityPub into the context of the late 90s and 2000s when I was registered on countless message boards. Imagine if all those message boards could inter-communicate using a common protocol. That's where ActivityPub could lead us. The usability aspect can be worked on, it can be worked around. The gain in internet freedom is worth the effort. Right now it's clearly aimed at slightly more adept users. But imagine if Joe Sixpack could login to the modern equivalent of AOL, post a message, and that message is federated across hundreds of softwares and hundreds and thousands of sites and eventually Joe gets a reply from someone halfway around the world using a completely different software. That is what I find magical.
  • panosfilianos 4y ago
    Hey, do you have any good intro to ActivityPub? Any aggregator or feed like RSS has? Looks very interesting.
    • INTPenis 4y ago
      No I'm afraid I've looked very little at the actual protocol, mostly been busy running a node. I have seen a few people write their own AP implementations, in their personal blogs for example. It doesn't seem hard. My suggestion to learn AP would be to integrate your own blog into AP first. That way you learn by doing.
      • panosfilianos 4y ago
        Will look into it. Thanks!
• CM30 4y ago
  Hmm, at the moment, I don't see any one option taking over in that regard. Mastodon is probably the most likely option so far, since I've seen a few people I follow there creating accounts there, but it's not a huge wave of people and I'm not sure it'll work out in the long run. Stuff like Discord, TikTok and Facebook have been mentioned, but they're just so different from Twitter that I don't see any of them replacing it (or Facebook doing well in the future in general). So I guess it's going to be a matter of seeing which of the Twitter esque replacement systems wins out eventually, whether it be Mastodon, Blue Sky or Nostr.
• skc 4y ago
  Nothing needs to replace Twitter, but I do think now would be the perfect time for someone to launch a competing service whereas that would have been foolhardy a few months ago. Nothing to do with the Musk takeover being seen as a negative or a positive, just perfect timing in the sense that there is suddenly a lot of attention being placed on Twitter right now.
• mcv 4y ago
  Isn't Mastodon pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter? And it has the advantage of being distributed and it supports Fediverse cross-platform sharing (with Friendica, GnuSocial, etc). I'm on Friendica so I can follow people on both Mastodon and Diaspora (which would be the drop-in replacement for Facebook). Still, I think we need something better. I'd like to see a social network with all of that, and support for email, but with sender-authentication (to stop spam), builtin encryption, but also Whatsapp/Signal style chat. And easily shift to whatever mode you're most comfortable with. And maybe also integrate blogging a bit more. I don't like having to choose between commenting on the blog itself or on the social share of the blog post; those two should be integrated. I see the current flock of distributed social networks as basically the testing bed that should lead to something like that. We're not there yet.
  • jules 4y ago
    What's the advantage of being distributed?
    • tiarafawn 4y ago
      Content moderation (which seems to be the biggest point of contention with Twitter right now) is decentralized. By choosing your hoster, you delegate content moderation capabilities for your feed to them. If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. I am not sure to which degree this is practiced/convenient in Mastodon currently, but its distributed nature enables this as an elegant solution to the content moderation problem IMO
      • sneak 4y ago
        > If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. But you lose all of your followers, so in practice this is never done. You’re stuck with the censorship imposed by your chosen instance operator. Most are more strict and less transparent than Twitter.
• rrwo 4y ago
  Why do we need anything to replace Twitter?
• throwawayacc2 4y ago
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  None, I don't think a majority of people would move to something new. Twitter is an old outdated concept now and people are too wary to move to something new.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  For me, this is really the only social media place I’m active (that’s why I have so many posts, hereabouts). I have a whole bunch of accounts in other venues, but most lie fallow. They are basically “placeholders.” I have to use a couple, from time to time. All that, to say, I don’t especially care what happens to Twitter. From where I sit, it appears as if a troll has bought it, and has declared that he plans to make it a troll playground. Sounds like fun, but I feel it was basically there, already. I have a lot of respect for Musk's tenacity and engineering prowess, but this is a different substrate. People aren't as easy to manage as engineering challenges.
• anotheryou 4y ago
  Is anyone working on something like twitter with a focus on curation? I have a lot of thoughts about it and would love to chat :)
• thinkingemote 4y ago
  people seem to focus on the negative. It's strange how since 2016 or so people have been trashing Twitter saying it's toxic, and now people want to protect it now the boss has changed, similarly seeing the worst. I think Musk can only improve matters here. I don't mind if it crashes and burns, it's already a Bad Thing. I'd like to see it improve.
• invalidusernam3 4y ago
  For me, it already has been replaced for a long time by reddit and instagram. Twitter and reddit share essentially the same purpose (content discovery) but reddit has much less noise and a better experience. Instagram is where I follow my friends and the odd famous person. Twitter has nothing to offer for me
• imagetic 4y ago
  A library card could replace Twitter.
• toyg 4y ago
  I don't know what will replace twitter, but I'm scared it might end up being something I actually use - causing its inevitable downfall. Please, Musk, keep that cesspool open so that all those flies will stay there - I don't want them in my neck of the woods.
• anthropodie 4y ago
  Here's an idea: stop trying to fix social media and instead try to connect with people in real life and we as a society might be happy again
  • jeremycarter 4y ago
    So the domain was taken then?
  • Arsenije 4y ago
    This
  • blitzar 4y ago
    Did you just reinvent tinder?
• FailMore 4y ago
  Please try out my mini social media site called Taaalk (https://www.taaalk.co/ https://www.taaalk.co/). It's a platform for long form conversations. Not quite like Twitter but good for in depth discussions
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  I think substack is probably in the best position: - Asymmetric. You can follow people who don't follow you. The most important differentiator twitter has from facebook. - Easy to get started writing, and even easier to get started reading, subscribing - you only need an email. - Community. Substacks at least have comment sections. Still, not the same as twitter. I think the basic of idea of substack - building it around email - has more potential in general. Maybe that's the future. Email is the open protocol for messaging and identity that everyone uses.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  How about none? Maybe we are seeing the beginning of society putting less value on anyone and everyone having a global public podium? If all social media public content reverts to streams of ads, influencers, marketers, politicians, misinformation campaigns and every nutjob on the planet providing their "expert" commentary, then why bother? I can't see the signal of people I want to follow anymore with all that noise and I'm sure others see the same thing. Social media has regressed to being a tabloid paper that talks about UFO's, bigfoot and what celebrity is divorcing or whatever. Its complete nonsense and mostly fabricated. Any new platform setup with similar features is going to regress to the same.
  • NikolaNovak 4y ago
    My experience may have been specific and circumstantial, but somehow, Google Plus for a while was some perfect utopian Star Trek ideal of what Social Network should be like. * Circles that were super easy to use and organize. All other social networks work hard to deter you from organizing and customizing your feed * Enormous amount of good content and easy curation and sharing. People would make Circles of e.g. "Really Good Photographers" or "Interesting Physicists", and then share those circles. So in the morning I could go "Hey I'd like to read a bit about interesting physics" and click my Physicists circle, and in the afternoon I could say "I want to see some pretty photos" and see various photographers. * It was good for customizing both content consumption as per above, but also content creation & sharing - I have a funny IT joke, I'll share it to my "Coworkers" and "Coding nerds" circles. I've done a really great wedding shoot this weekend, I'll share it to my "Photonerds" circle. etc. It was genuinely amazing and awesome and perfect, for me. Everything since has been actively moving away.
• imartin2k 4y ago
  LinkedIn
• ianopolous 4y ago
  We're working on a p2p protocol which aims to be a long term solution to this and, more generally, a social web, which has: 1. 100% portable accounts (you can unilaterally move host, and you keep your social graph, and all links to your content continue to work) 2. You only see things from people you follow (the poster can also choose their audience) 3. Everything is end-to-end-encrypted (no server admin can read anything) You can read more here: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media You can also write your own apps that leverage the private social storage: https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web
• notacoward 4y ago
  Probably some ActivityPub-based megasite, federated with smaller (even self hosted) sites everywhere. Mastodon seems to be on the right track here. Personally, I think an updated version of good old NNTP - the protocol underlying Usenet when it was at its largest - would be far better than ActivityPub as it exists, but there seems to be little developer/hoster appetite for that.
• wseqyrku 4y ago
  > If Twitter crashes and burns, Are you spitballing or is that a wish?
• gilbetron 4y ago
  This will happen as with World of Warcraft - there will be years of talk about a "Twitter killer", and nothing will match that, but lots of alternates will appear. Twitter will be the Twitter killer as it fades away, not to nothing, but to a fraction of what it once was, still populated by some people that enjoy it, but will become less and less of a cultural mover. Which is really a good thing.
• thetwittybitty 4y ago
  Twitter is an internet megaphone. Plain and simple. Some people use it like those assholes who drive around neighborhoods blaring something out of their portable car megaphones. I heard them recently while traveling through small towns in Eastern Europe. They usually blare political rhetoric or advertising. Don't really see how you can stop them or their Twitter equivalents unless by using a point based reputation system. Then however we won't be able to say we are different than China as far as the social credit thing goes. Once the box is open, it's difficult to find all the pieces that wondered around the floor.
• raywu 4y ago
  RSS was a good protocol
• flyingsky 4y ago
  I believe we've come to the end of the social-media road. There is now new social media platform that will replace or outdo existing ones
• LinuxBender 4y ago
  There was a Southpark episode about this. Well, not Twitter, but Walmart. Same or very similar problem. Everyone in town was convinced to stand up to the big-man and riot against Walmart in favor of the little stores that had more integrity. Walmart was destroyed, people rejoiced and everyone went to the smaller local store. This caused the local store to get big and experience the same problems that Walmart had and displaced other small businesses. Then they rioted and burnt down the formerly small store. Rinse and repeat. So Mastodon then? It is federated, but does that solve the problem? Or do a handful of clusters get really popular and then all the people that made Twitter toxic move in and corrupt the Mastodon nodes? Does Mastodon then create mechanisms similar to "verified" accounts, shadow banning, de-ranking algorithms, etc...? Do bots infiltrate Mastodon? Does the DHS Ministry of Truth coerce the popular Mastodon instances into having a government portal for monitoring and silencing posts? Are we entirely certain that governments did not pay developers to create Mastodon? I ask because that is exactly how Google project Birds of a Feather, Stanford SRI and Facebook project LifeLog, DARPA/CIA started. I honestly don't know the answer, just a gut feeling. Is this just a technology problem or also a societal problem? Could it be that when the internet was small, there were little pockets of people forums, chat groups, etc that had mostly like minded people and they mostly sortof got along and were not popular enough to draw in coercion from corporations and governmental entities? Did Twitter connect all those pockets of people, corporations and governments leading to the inevitable drive to win the psychological control over the masses? Is there money, power or control to be obtained in winning the hearts and minds of the people?
  • jtode 4y ago
    >There was a Southpark episode about this. Well, not Twitter, but Walmart. Same problem. Everyone in town was convinced to stand up to the big-man and riot against Walmart in favor of the little stores that had more integrity. Walmart was destroyed, people rejoiced and everyone went to the smaller local store. This caused the local store to get big and experience the same problems that Walmart had and displaced other small businesses. Then they rioted and burnt down the formerly small store. Rinse and repeat. It seems to me that this SP episode is describing a failure of American entrepreneurism. The script posits that a Walmart replaced a single store and grew fat and complacent, and when the Walmart was gone, everyone who was previously going to the walmart then flocked to that single store in South Park, rather than dispersing back to the many local hardware/grocery/dry goods stores they had shopped at in all their respective towns, before Walmart showed up, choked them all out, and imposed a new model where everyone who doesn't live where the walmart is now has to drive 20-60 minutes to do their shopping. Granted, the people who had previously run these stores and watched their customers choose Walmart in sufficient numbers to let them die are probably not going to jump at the chance to reestablish their old businesses when only one Walmart in a vast network has been momentarily eradicated. Nonetheless, this is America we're talking about, and someone would... but not in Colorado, apparently, if you ask masters Stone and Parker about it. In their America, apparently nobody remembers that there was once a world without corporate behemoths reducing everything to a lowest common denominator nightmare, and once they are separated from it, they react like the chained in Plato's cave and set about recreating it like some sort of neurotic gollum-like cargo cultist, desperate for more cheap overseas goods. I have never cared to live in the world they seem to inhabit, have to say.
• giantg2 4y ago
  "What social media site could replace Twitter?" Targeted ads by celebrities. That's mostly what it is these days. Someone else mention journalists, but God do I hate "articles" fragmented as tweets.
• mgarfias 4y ago
  I hope it doesn’t. It’s just as evil as Facebook.
• Grinders 4y ago
  [dead]
• rstevens333 4y ago
  Not "if," but "when".