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Ask HN: Why isn't anyone creating or promoting an alternative to Twitter?
In the midst of various problems faced by Twitter, an alternative application for Twitter has a great opportunity. As has happened during the migration of users from Digg to Reddit or from Yahoo to Google. But I don't see any Twitter alternatives popping up.
- emptyparadise 4y agoMastodon
- darthrupert 4y agoBecause it's already been here since 2016: Mastodon.
- geenat 4y agoEveryones too busy building a note taking app.
- mikkergp 4y agoKara Swisher recently interviewed Noam Bardin, the creator of: https://post.news/ https://post.news/ This seems like a public square with the exact opposite goals of Elon (heavy moderation)
- throwboi123 4y ago> We believe in freedom of speech and will oppose any government's attempt to censor speech on our platform. However, we have rules, which we plan to rigorously enforce via content moderation, with the help of our community Bruh…
- rsynnott 4y agoThat is, to a greater or lesser extent, more or less the approach taken by _every_ social network. Even 4chan has rules.
- fsflover 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33653902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33653902
- madelyn-goodman 4y agoIt's interesting because I don't know if it's possible for anything to truly replace Twitter. I think what will happen is people will splinter off into online forums where they feel most comfortable based on the level of moderation on each site and who is there. Twitter was unique in that everyone was on it, sadly I don't think we'll ever have that again.
- smileysteve 4y agoReddit is a good example why; The technology isn't impossible, but it needs a business plan that's not traditional advertising to have an decent be exit.
- Moissanite 4y agoI wonder how much people are secretly just hoping Twitter dies with no replacement. Skepticism about social media is basically the default position for educated professionals now, who are likely to already have distanced themselves from Facebook. The Twitter users I know would be happy to get rid of it, if not for the perceived career benefits (likewise with LinkedIn). When Twitter no longer offers any ladder-climbing benefits for technocrats, it will degenerate to be a shittier cousin of Instagram.
- exoterictruth 4y agoWhat about ladder-climbing benefits for artists?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Moissanite 4y agoNot being an artist, I have no idea if this is a thing - but if so, I suppose the same logic applies; except I would expect artists to also be able to get value from photo/video content on Instagram or Tiktok to a much greater extent than technology workers.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoI want to have place where I can follow some people's written content without being "friends" with them.
- anony23 4y agoBecause Twitter is fine. If you ignore the fud, the experience on Twitter hasn't changed at all.
- exoterictruth 4y agoThe probability of bankruptcy is rising the longer Musk is in control which would likely cause it to shut down completely!
- pier25 4y agoHow many companies has Musk bankrupted?
- Kye 4y agoIn this specific case he warned bankruptcy is a possibility. When the egomaniac admits he might fail, it's time to listen.
- antifa 4y agoSome commenters in other threads said he has at previous companies sent the "bankruptcy" email in the past, allegedly for the purpose of increasing worker productivity.
- jpeter 4y agoZuckerberg should be the obvious canidate for building a alternative. You could probably just use facebooks timeline logic. But he is too busy building the metaverse
- codingdave 4y agoHonestly, because I don't see what problem Twitter is solving in the first place. Twitter popped into our reality as the winner in a time when social media was launching and everyone wanted to be a voice on the internet. And for that it works and thrives on its own momentum. But I'm not sure being a voice on the internet is actually a problem the needs a solution now that social media has matured and many people are backing away from it.
- mattdesl 4y agoThere are a lot of alternatives popping up: BlueSky, Mastodon, Farcaster, nostr. There are also some older protocols that people are still building on like secure scuttlebutt. I've written about some of the differences of these protocols here: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
- elsherbini 4y agoThat was a good read for me - someone who has heard of Mastondon and ActivityPub but hasn't really grokked the tech and definitely didn't know other alternatives.
- jfhr 4y agowhat about tumblr? that's where seemingly a lot of former twitter users are moving to
- throwboi123 4y agoPlease no. Kill Twitter. Kill Facebook as well while we are at it.
- lmarcos 4y agoI guess because we are not in the 2010s anymore. Something new will probably emerge, but it won't be like Twitter.
- jasfi 4y agoI actually had a really good idea for a social media site this month, just before Elon bought twitter. I've been working on the idea a bit, but without a strong network effect it might not go anywhere. People flocked to Twitter because of who was there.
- sph 4y agoI have one as well. What's your killer feature? Mine is that it is invite-only, and if you break the rules, the person that invited you and everybody else they have invited gets booted from the platform. Apart from that, the only other rule is don't be illegal, don't spam, and post whatever the hell you want. I don't mean it to replace Twitter. It's more like a social experiment. If there are permanent social consequences to being twats, what would a social network be like? Also, given this major risk, you'd only invite people you really know or trust. I'm still ironing out the details of this thing. We'll see if I'll ever get to build it.
- jasfi 4y agoI'm going the way Twitter used to be going towards, that is, enforcing good social behavior. I'm specifically going to work on identifying unjustifiable hate/bullying and moderating/banning those users. That will be the killer feature, and part of that will be in the techniques to do so efficiently and justly. Like yours, mine is also a social experiment, but I don't care if not everyone wants a place like that. I know that at the very least a lot of people do. Still, without enough users it would die. Right now this isn't a priority for me to build, but the code could be useful for other projects too, so why not.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI wouldn’t invest in a network where I can be booted for the bad behavior of somebody I’ve never met.
- antifa 4y ago> the person that invited you and everybody else they have invited gets booted from the platform. A less extreme/draconian version of this sounds cool
- hulitu 4y agoTruth social ?
- aaron695 4y ago
- bitlax 4y agoGoogle returned better search results than Yahoo, and Reddit was objectively a better experience than Digg 2.0. The move was a positive experience for the entire userbase and that isn't true for any of the current crop of Twitter alternatives.
- sanjayio 4y agoWho says they aren’t? I’ve been reached out to to help create one recently. I imagine there are several in the works.
- pier25 4y agoI keep using Twitter and not much has changed for me in the last couple of weeks. Honestly I think most of it is FUD at this point.
- rsynnott 4y agoWell, there's Mastodon, of course. I'm kind of surprised that whoever owns Tumblr this week isn't pushing it harder; Tumblr is, when it comes to it, more or less twitter without the character limit and with a much worse mobile app (most Twitter features were effectively copied from Tumblr). That said, I'm not sure that there needs to be a single direct replacement for Twitter; historically, when a social network dies, generally it isn't replaced by a direct clone but by different things.
- r0bfelty 4y agoActually, Tumblr has been hard at work promoting itself as an alternative to Twitter. Did you know that you can buy 2 blue check marks on Tumblr for only $7.99? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-twitter-tumblr-blue-check-marks/672165/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-...
- metadat 4y agoHave you actually tried mastodon? It's really slow. I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement, Note how few HN submissions point to masto posts, it's ~ 10,000:1 Tweets:Masto.
- rsynnott 4y ago> Have you actually tried mastodon? Yeah, I've largely moved over to Mastodon; most of the people I was most interested in following on Twitter are now there, so... > It's really slow. That's very instance-dependent. The one I use is pretty fast, certainly faster than Twitter these days (I note that loading timelines is no longer as snappy as it used to be.) I did previously use mastodon.online, and it was borderline unusably slow, granted. > I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. The UX is a mix of good and bad. It has a linear time-based feed with no helpful "suggestions", like Twitter a decade ago, which I would consider good. The UX around following people on other instances is bad (button to redirect you to your own instance) to comically bad (link to paste into your instance's search box) depending on instance setup... > I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement, It is different, and it's certainly not a replacement for _all_ Twitter usecases, but it's largely good enough for me; I'm mostly now using Twitter just to observe the implosion of Twitter. I doubt that, in five years, Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement. There may not be a single Twitter replacement. But it solves a decent subset of the things that Twitter solved for people, in a way that is in some ways nicer than Twitter (it never suggests that I follow weird Nazis, for instance).
- throw_m239339 4y agoWith what money? VC money? Which VC? What would the business model be exactly? Ad money is drying up as companies are slashing online ad budgets. Now I'm sure eventually if Twitter goes down, traditional media will settle on a specific app to promote heavily, but this time, it will be on their terms.
- durnygbur 4y agoThe terms of traditional media are monthly paid subscription and ads in the paid subscription.
- durnygbur 4y agoBecause it is not useful or cool at all? If some politician, VIP, or other billionaire want to declare a war or inform about their career change and hit the reader with a sign in wall, they can get a blog. 1/6
- gravitate 4y agoWell app.net[0] had great potential and got shutdown. From Wikipedia: > On May 6, 2014, the founders announced that subscription renewals had been so poor that there were no longer funds to retain development staff for App.net and future operations would be on a maintenance-only basis using contractors I used to love that platform in its heyday. You didn't have to pay with your data, you paid with a thing called, you know, money (an esoteric term in social media circles). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
- rkwasny 4y agoI created one over the weekend :) https://github.com/mag-/folx https://github.com/mag-/folx Stay tuned for launch next week! :)