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Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

142 points by tokenadult 4y ago

jqpabc123 4y ago
Elon Musk is literally inviting this with his self inflicted Twitter meltdown.
colesantiago 4y ago
so why do they need to know my linkedin profile? I know it's optional, just curious about their motives for data collection.
- costcofries 4y ago
  They're obviously trying to curate the supply side of the knowledge marketplace.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Most likely they'll do a Facebook style thing - launch with some level of exclusivity to build buzz.
- duxup 4y ago
  I was able to sign up without filling that out at all.
thal3s 4y ago
We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social
- leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
  - KoftaBob 4y ago
    Only former Twitter employees can join that server, it's not meant to be a place for users who want to emulate the Twitter biases or something. It's meant to be a community of Twitter alumni.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do. Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
  - WC3w6pXxgGd 4y ago
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out. How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      @jeremyjh I genuinely appreciate your comments! Allow me to kindly respond... > ...best way to follow my interests... If you're still stuck on the topic of following interests, may i direct your attention to the following website: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basic-tips/#HowDoIFollowHashtags https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi... And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of the above website. I have no affiliation, but have found it handy to give out to newcomers to the Fediverse - regardless if such newcomers are using the Mastodon *software*, or pixelfed, or funkwhale instances, etc. The "Beginners Start Here" area of the website is a section i highly suggest you and all newcomers to spend time reviewing. > ...How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? I'm detecting in your statement that there is an assumption that the commercial socials (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the Fediverse have the same goals....but i believe they differ. Most instances on the Fedi are cool with being village-sized communities that can easily interconnect with all/many other village-sized communities...The Fedi's goal is not to have a single, massive commercializable silo. There is no such overacrhing goial to scale up at all cost, as might exist for commercial services. While, there are no doubt paid Fedi instances that legitimately are commercial by their definiton and operation, their goals are not as audacious as the entities coming out of Silicon Valley. So, if some newcomers struggle during onboarding, while i never want to see people struggle, maybe its not the end of the world if newcomers have to invest a little time in learning the ways and customs of what amounts to a new world for them. > ...I'm just...skeptical it can take off... You have every right to your opinion of course! That being said, as I noted above, the Fedi cares less if it "takes off". Its goals are more about quality of connections rather than numbers of connections. Richer and more fulfilling interactions are sought after, while brazen increases of follower counts are not. I should also clarify facts here: Mastodon - the software and initial instance/server - only started life late 2016. While the greater Fediverse (that mastodon is only one part of) has been in existence since around 2008. Yes, that's right, none of this is new! Not the networks, nor the latest wave of newcomers. So, while you (and some other newcomers) doubt this will take off - well before this latest wave of newcomers - there have been already millions of active users interacting with each other for almost a decade and a half. If you're willing to invest a little time/effort, then please by all means do participate on the Fediverse, and enjoy. But, if you don't think it is worth it, that's fine too; no harm, no foul.
- johnday 4y ago
  If you think that Mastodon cannot be bought and ruined by billionaires, you are wrong. It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Sure, there are embrace-and-extinguish scenarios with decentralized protocols. But the alternative is that you’re always in the grip of some billionaire’s fever dream right from the start. Mastodon is live and resilient right now. The future is up to the users.
- crsv 4y ago
  The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.
  - ceres 4y ago
    I’m willing to bet a pretty penny that the next big social media will be built on the fediverse. > Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks. Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.
  - pnemonic 4y ago
    Do you have any actual facts to back this up? I would be interested to know why you are so sure of this.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.
    - nelsonenzo 4y ago
      How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.
      - bfgoodrich 4y ago
      - NoGravitas 4y ago
        The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.
- KVFinn 4y ago
  Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown. Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed. Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Apparently this is the key difference they're working on for Bluesky. Trying to make accounts truly portable between federated servers.
    - davoneus 4y ago
      IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org. Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit. I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    > Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Too true. And in cases like that, I have already blocked bitcoinhackers.org . And it's trivial to block individuals OR whole servers from your account. And server admins can block as well to the whole server. So, sure, go ahead and make a spam-stodon. You'll be defederated within a week.
- bergenty 4y ago
  It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.
      - kibwen 4y ago
        You find what instance your friends are on and sign up there, same as any website? I did it last week and it was trivial.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      Maybe that’s what we need but it’s definitely not what people want and it will never succeed in its current form. The whole motivation for a lot of people is to get their voice out to as many people as possible, not to indulge their interests in specific niches.
- standardUser 4y ago
  Users don't want convoluted nonsense like Mastodon. They want a one-click sign up and ease of use.
  - krapp 4y ago
    That's always been the assumption, but a lot of people are trying it anyway.
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      By a lot of people, do you mean 0.3% of Twitter users?
      - krapp 4y ago
        A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for. That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure for Mastodon. This isn't a zero-sum game.
        edude03 4y ago
        It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.
        krapp 4y ago
        Assuming that Twitter doesn't crash and burn in the next week or so, and assuming Mastodon doesn't draw enough users to create its own network effect, sure. But then, people don't always act according to a single metric. Mastodon doesn't have ads and it doesn't follow a single moderation policy. I can see people sticking with both for different reasons.
- davoneus 4y ago
  I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example: You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'. Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back. The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature. Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.
hn2017 4y ago
We need more alternatives to Twitter. Hopefully one of them will excel. Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.
- aaron_m04 4y ago
  > Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts. That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.
LanceJones 4y ago
With Twitter usage apparently climbing, why is this important? Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >Twitter usage apparently climbing, Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?
  - kibwen 4y ago
    And according to whom? Musk, who has no legal, economic, or moral incentive to be truthful?
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Idk if you’re an engineer or not but there’s an aspect of “reading the room” that your comment fails to capture. You can take the superficial tweets on usage for what they are but there are larger things happening around those specific statements that would lend themselves to “Twitter is actually dying this time.”
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  There are people who are happy to use products that benefit Elon Musk, and reward his behavior. There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I don't believe it's climbing in the real sense. I think people like watching disasters unfold, they are taking to their Twitter feed to see news of its fast moving downfall. Refreshing to see what the next ridiculous move is, and getting that dopamine hit when it happens. It's not sustainable growth.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Also people logging in to export their history count as DAU.
personjerry 4y ago
Oh it's another ad disguised as an article
- theCrowing 4y ago
  it's called Advertorial :(
desireco42 4y ago
I read it till waitlist... I get it but also... I don't want to wait, by the time they send me email, I will forget what it was. I think there is a place for, not Twitter alternatives, but for newer ways how we can be social and connect and discover interesting people. And I do welcome those explorations and want to support it, but waitlist is not something I enjoy.
bogwog 4y ago
Elon Musk is a clown and it would be very entertaining to watch him lose $44B as Twitter crashes and burns, like slipping on a banana peel. ...but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting and I want to see it work out. I don't know much about this Noam Bardin person, but considering Waze is just another bottomless pit of data collection, my hopes aren't very high that this will be anything notable beyond having a unique page layout. I don't see a reason to use it over one of the many Mastodon instances. Maybe Twitter's problems are due to the traditional business model, and shifting towards paid accounts might change that. Or, it might make them 10x worse. Idk, but it's certainly the most interesting thing happening in social media right now.
- macspoofing 4y ago
  >but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting Who says this platform wouldn't be reliant on advertising? You need to provide free access to build your social graph, and then you need advertising to monetize it. Paid subscription is more of a supplement at best (think YouTube/YouTube Premium).
ceres 4y ago
I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point anyone who willingly joins a new VC funded social media monstrosity is just a masochist. Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
  - ttul 4y ago
    Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.
    - jqpabc123 4y ago
      Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way. On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.
      - ceres 4y ago
        > It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.
0x445442 4y ago
I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.
- altacc 4y ago
  It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    Who likes Twitter culture?
    - thinkingemote 4y ago
      This is the key perceptive question!
    - stusmall 4y ago
      There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical mind about what they posted. I think a big part of what "Twitter culture" is it was many things for many people. Some people use as a place for weird shit posting, some use it for porn, some enjoy bias confirmation, some enjoy the drama and beef. I guess some people enjoy anime avatar reply-guys since some of the new offshoots seem to be catering to maximize them. For me Twitter would have been better if it didn't have any of that but I get that using it as basically a shitty, short-form substack isn't the most popular usecase. So what I liked about "twitter culture" is that all of these things could co-exist on one site and just curating who you followed could dramatically change that experience. With a lot of the current drama some of the more serious people are leaving. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but I don't expect my use case to stay intact.
nitin-pai 4y ago
“Protocols, not platforms” is the way to go, as Mike Masnick lays out.[1] What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse. [1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
globalise83 4y ago
There was probably an opportunity a few weeks ago to create a social network only for the elites who could prove that they had a Twitter verified account (e.g. by putting a verification code in the bio / description). That would create crazy amounts of FOMO! But unfortunately now anyone can get one, so it's not as attractive. :)
mirzap 4y ago
How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternative" narrative - twitter gets more user base and more likely is going to succeed in future iterations - while "alternatives" get stuck in the past. How many failed startups tried to go against facebook, as "social networking alternative" as a rebellion to some bad facebook press, policies or scandals? How many of those succeeded? None.
- pjc50 4y ago
  The current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow. (posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is what Elon means by free speech)
  - BitPirate 4y ago
    If you post the correct link which is joinmastodon.org there's no problem.
  - discardedrefuse 4y ago
    That's because, up until a few weeks ago, joinmastodon.com was a spam domain. It's only recently been purchased and redirected to the real domain: joinmastodon.org
- jeffbee 4y ago
  There are many counter precedents. The most prominent in my mind is Zoom: exactly like all the others with only slight differences, zero-to-100% market share in 3 years.
bedhead 4y ago
[flagged]
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - macspoofing 4y ago
    To be fair - OP isn't wrong. There has been a lot of "pearl-clutching" about nothing-burger issues since 2016. This era has throwbacks to the 80s moral-majority/church-lady culture, with a sprinkling of "The Satanic Panic" and "McCarthyism".
    - bedhead 4y ago
      Yup. Everything flipped. The left is the new religious right only on steroids.
  - bedhead 4y ago
    There is no right wing media ecosystem. There is Fox, which I’ve literally never once in my life watched and have made fun of for two decades. Then there are a bunch of rinky-dink outlets no one even knows. There is however, a giant, ubiquitous, controlling ecosystem of liberal media and news and information outlets who we all used to rely on for being at least pretty much objective which I’ve grown insanely f-ing sick of and find beyond disgraceful (they’re all now far worse and more shameful than Fox ever was) since around 2016
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Oh fine, I'll articulate why. Musk doesn't know what he has bought. He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that make nobody happy, but keep trouble at a minimum. Musk is obviously incapable of doing this. He just started, and immediately spooked the advertisers. Then he started whining, and threatening both advertisers and his own employees, apparently not realizing that he has no real power over either. It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. At this rate I expect him to be hit with fat fines from the EU, demands from various other countries to comply with their rules, piss off advertisers, run into trouble with illegal content of various kinds, and have stability issues and security exploits. It's not that it offends me so much to have a conservative driven platform. It's that the man is clearly incompetent and flailing, and as amusing as that is to watch, it's clear the platform won't survive it so alternatives are needed.
phendrenad2 4y ago
It seems deeply ironic that Noam is starting a Twitter competitor, when he's mostly well-known for some comments he made about lazy startup employees which seem like something Elon Musk might have said. But then you realize it's not ironic at all.
macspoofing 4y ago
This manifesto is generic enough that it aligns with all existing social-network platforms. So this Twitter alternative is bringing nothing new to the table. Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers. Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.
mattdesl 4y ago
Fleeing one centralized platform into another is futile, and will end in the same problems. I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
mastodon is surprisingly good, imo. I joined about a year ago. It worked fine, but it was basically dead for me. I didn't know who to follow and I couldn't find anything interesting to do. Everything changed in the last couple of weeks. It's busy now. People are posting and interacting. A large chunk of German twitter moved over to mastodon completely. And a good chunk of electronics twitter is also now on mastodon. My timeline is simply a chronological order of post of people that I follow, no suggested post, no advertisement, etc. It's very possible the whole twitter-is-dead talk will be over in a week. But mastodon has some real traction.
dqpb 4y ago
> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; > Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them. If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?
- lbriner 4y ago
  This is the hard problem in a nutshell and one thing that no-one who proposes "an alternative Twitter" seems to get. Extreme free speech? Racism? Maybe. Racial hatred? No, I'm a bit uncomfortable now. Someone questioning the mainstream? Seems harmless; because lizards are taking over the world! No, you are mad but the person who thinks that Soros is taking over the world is welcoime because that sounds less mad. Good luck.
- 7952 4y ago
  He is a social media user, no more, no less. The problem is when we start attaching authority to that. And the less anonymous the platform, the more authority has an impact.
- dqpb 4y ago
  lol, what do the downvotes even mean in this context? Is this a stupid question?
Entinel 4y ago
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Growing a garden on someone else's land means I don't need to worry about the upkeep. To continue your metaphor, leasing farm land is literally a thing people do. I genuinely do not believe the large majority of people want to worry about hosting, community management, etc etc. The people that do are in the extreme minority. >To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. You are using Hacker News right now because there is an audience and community. That is the upside to the user.
mgdev 4y ago
Pretty sneaky, using your referral link in this context.
Jerry2 4y ago
NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse. Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard. [1] https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/
- standardUser 4y ago
  Until Mastodon finds a way to let the average user sign up without any friction, it will never be more than a small niche service.
adastra22 4y ago
> Write posts of any length and share them broadly So, not Twitter. The 240-char limit of Twitter is really essential to its eclectic dynamic.
jdelman 4y ago
> "Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad?" Nostalgia alert. Social media used to provide 100% value all the time? Trolls didn't exist 10 years ago? "Rational debates" were thriving with a 140 character limit? When Twitter became a resource for learning about research on Covid and coverage of protests worldwide - surely subjects that would be fair game on "Post"[0] - I was certainly getting a lot of utility, but I can't honestly say I never felt angry or sad. This all just feels incredibly naive, like we can just turn back the clock. [0] Speaking of nostalgia, I long for a future where company/product names aren't just dictionary words anymore.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's the fake past, like back in the day when people actually cared about craftsmanship, customer service, and their lawns, and weren't so offended all the time or so scared of hard work.
barbazoo 4y ago
Billionaires gotta billionaire. Instead of promoting a healthy, sustainable platform, everyone just wants to lock people into their walled garden to extract money from them.
racl101 4y ago
Wasn't what's name .... Jack Dorsey making some alternative?
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Like a divorced dad making up for past grievances with his new, younger spouse.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Why? Why even get in this race, there is nothing to win. Win by not playing, and just give those millions of dollars that were about to commit to losing anyway to local schools, community centers, food banks, and hey maybe just buy housing for the homeless (oh no, so unfair! they got a house for free! All they had to do was be on the brink of death every single day!). Do something good with those dollars instead.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
All i see is he started a wait list.
whitelabrat 4y ago
IRC forever!!!
ss108 4y ago
"Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?" No lol, wtf is he talking about
harel 4y ago
The waiting list is shortened if you invite 5 friends with a special link. Whomever posted this basically invited all of us. I think twitter's "high" traffic right now is akin to a traffic jam on the motorway because people slow down to watch that horrible terrible accident...
tokenadult 4y ago
OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup. I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.) Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.) The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will. Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.
- dang 4y ago
  Nice to see a tokenadult comment after I don't want to check how long!
algurithm 4y ago
More options are a good thing, but his Twitter alternative might be misidentifying Twitter's actual strongest point. Allow me to elaborate and tell me if you disagree, but this is how I feel: I never used twitter because of the social aspects. At all. I'm not there because I want to have a chat. I just use Twitter to get new artwork from artists I like or follow game devs who post their content there. For me, Twitter's real value was always content sharing. The social aspect was tolerable at best and detrimental at worst, which is why I don't want to use an alternative explicitly focusing on the social aspect. What I really want is a Twitter with content creation focus, instead of social. I think most alternatives are focusing on the social aspects, so I thought I should share this sentiment.
jwmoz 4y ago
What if, someone just wakes a twitter clone, charges a small amount, keeps it simple, makes some profit and doesn't get greedy. Every decent tech thing over that last 10 years once it goes big and vc and markets are involved it goes to shit.
Entinel 4y ago
I'm very interested in seeing how Twitter dying shakes out in terms of social media. Frankly, I don't think people "get it" and that includes me. From where I sit no one wants to self-host, no one wants to be advertised to, but no one wants to pay for anything either. As always, one million "alternatives" will be made, they will die one by one in some Squid Game style battle royale and then society will choose one and the cycle continues.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
How many twitter articles does hacker news need a day? I get it, you're social media junkies and your main supplier is now giving you tainted stuff. I'm sorry but that has almost nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with your own shortcomings.
- mikeryan 4y ago
  I mean, if nothing else, it’s a fascinating business case study playing out in real time.
afhammad 4y ago
So is https://twitter.com/gabor https://twitter.com/gabor https://t2.social/ https://t2.social/
afhammad 4y ago
He wasn't the founder of Waze, he was the CEO.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
Sounds awful. I don't go on Twitter to "learn" from my betters (presumably, the founder includes himself in that category). If you look at FTX, you have these supposed "journalists" quoting from "Autism Capital" on Twitter...that is where their sources are. I am guessing "Autism Capital" is some random guy, in his mom's bedroom, making no money from this...and there are journalists taking down $80k/year just ripping stories from that. The question this should raise is: why do we need the journalists? These people are pointless, they don't have interesting opinions, they are just information tollgates, Twitter removes that friction totally (equally, I worked in finance, I started working just before the Twitter age and assumed that everyone else was very diligent/knowledgeable/doing lots of good research...and then all these people hopped onto Twitter, start outputting more information, and you realise they are just total idiots...which I also realised after working in the industry, Twitter exposes the man behind the curtain). Give me the anonymous cesspit. If it makes you mad and upset, don't go on there, that is on you. The doctor can't be blamed for the needle being sharp.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  The psuedojournalists you are referring to are worse than simple plagiarizers: they share content they lack the capacity to analyze, but still add their own spin. I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    They are also overwhelmingly people who get triggered by random people they don't know online, and are pushing for this narrowing of the information space so that their safety/income is maintained. You are right, the spin is as bad as the copying. Always an agenda, that agenda is never made explicit, every event, same underlying cause. It often seems we have the worst possible people in that role of relaying information (and I do actually feel more comfortable with someone who doesn't pretend to be either objective or, shock, even particularly serious).
vannevar 4y ago
Twitter shouldn't be a service, it should be a protocol. Technically, when Twitter launched it didn't offer much you couldn't already do with email and listserv.
fourstar 4y ago
>Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter? No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.
Nifty3929 4y ago
I'm really excited to see competition in this market. I wish Twitter the best, and I hope Elon succeeds with that. I also hope Noam succeeds. And maybe they will push each other to be better for users overall. One fear I have is that platforms will divide along ideological lines and inhibit respectful disagreement and open conversation. We seem to be short enough on that already and I really don't want it to get worse. It's so important for us to acknowledge that the people "on the other side" are also smart, well educated, and want the best for people - just like we do.
biggerChris 4y ago
That’s cheating. Your link is a referral link. Stop it.
orthecreedence 4y ago
Cool! That's what we need! TWO Twitters!! One wasn't useless enough. How about we take all that time and energy and build a few fission plants.
hengestone 4y ago
Haven't seen discussed yet, but for me the killer feature would be the ability they mention to be able to pay for individual "articles". I.e. maybe a federated micropayment news feed where i don't have to subscribe to NYTimes AND WaPo, AND (many others), but only pay pennies for individual stories.

142 points by tokenadult 4y ago

Elon Musk is literally inviting this with his self inflicted Twitter meltdown.

so why do they need to know my linkedin profile? I know it's optional, just curious about their motives for data collection.

costcofries 4y ago
They're obviously trying to curate the supply side of the knowledge marketplace.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Most likely they'll do a Facebook style thing - launch with some level of exclusivity to build buzz.
duxup 4y ago
I was able to sign up without filling that out at all.

thal3s 4y ago

We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social

leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  Only former Twitter employees can join that server, it's not meant to be a place for users who want to emulate the Twitter biases or something. It's meant to be a community of Twitter alumni.
mxuribe 4y ago
Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do. Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
- WC3w6pXxgGd 4y ago
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out. How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    @jeremyjh I genuinely appreciate your comments! Allow me to kindly respond... > ...best way to follow my interests... If you're still stuck on the topic of following interests, may i direct your attention to the following website: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basic-tips/#HowDoIFollowHashtags https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi... And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of the above website. I have no affiliation, but have found it handy to give out to newcomers to the Fediverse - regardless if such newcomers are using the Mastodon *software*, or pixelfed, or funkwhale instances, etc. The "Beginners Start Here" area of the website is a section i highly suggest you and all newcomers to spend time reviewing. > ...How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? I'm detecting in your statement that there is an assumption that the commercial socials (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the Fediverse have the same goals....but i believe they differ. Most instances on the Fedi are cool with being village-sized communities that can easily interconnect with all/many other village-sized communities...The Fedi's goal is not to have a single, massive commercializable silo. There is no such overacrhing goial to scale up at all cost, as might exist for commercial services. While, there are no doubt paid Fedi instances that legitimately are commercial by their definiton and operation, their goals are not as audacious as the entities coming out of Silicon Valley. So, if some newcomers struggle during onboarding, while i never want to see people struggle, maybe its not the end of the world if newcomers have to invest a little time in learning the ways and customs of what amounts to a new world for them. > ...I'm just...skeptical it can take off... You have every right to your opinion of course! That being said, as I noted above, the Fedi cares less if it "takes off". Its goals are more about quality of connections rather than numbers of connections. Richer and more fulfilling interactions are sought after, while brazen increases of follower counts are not. I should also clarify facts here: Mastodon - the software and initial instance/server - only started life late 2016. While the greater Fediverse (that mastodon is only one part of) has been in existence since around 2008. Yes, that's right, none of this is new! Not the networks, nor the latest wave of newcomers. So, while you (and some other newcomers) doubt this will take off - well before this latest wave of newcomers - there have been already millions of active users interacting with each other for almost a decade and a half. If you're willing to invest a little time/effort, then please by all means do participate on the Fediverse, and enjoy. But, if you don't think it is worth it, that's fine too; no harm, no foul.
johnday 4y ago
If you think that Mastodon cannot be bought and ruined by billionaires, you are wrong. It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Sure, there are embrace-and-extinguish scenarios with decentralized protocols. But the alternative is that you’re always in the grip of some billionaire’s fever dream right from the start. Mastodon is live and resilient right now. The future is up to the users.
crsv 4y ago
The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.
- ceres 4y ago
  I’m willing to bet a pretty penny that the next big social media will be built on the fediverse. > Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks. Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.
- pnemonic 4y ago
  Do you have any actual facts to back this up? I would be interested to know why you are so sure of this.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.
  - nelsonenzo 4y ago
    How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.
    - bfgoodrich 4y ago
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.
KVFinn 4y ago
Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown. Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed. Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Apparently this is the key difference they're working on for Bluesky. Trying to make accounts truly portable between federated servers.
  - davoneus 4y ago
    IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org. Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit. I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.
- noasaservice 4y ago
  > Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Too true. And in cases like that, I have already blocked bitcoinhackers.org . And it's trivial to block individuals OR whole servers from your account. And server admins can block as well to the whole server. So, sure, go ahead and make a spam-stodon. You'll be defederated within a week.
bergenty 4y ago
It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.
    - kibwen 4y ago
      You find what instance your friends are on and sign up there, same as any website? I did it last week and it was trivial.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Maybe that’s what we need but it’s definitely not what people want and it will never succeed in its current form. The whole motivation for a lot of people is to get their voice out to as many people as possible, not to indulge their interests in specific niches.
standardUser 4y ago
Users don't want convoluted nonsense like Mastodon. They want a one-click sign up and ease of use.
- krapp 4y ago
  That's always been the assumption, but a lot of people are trying it anyway.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    By a lot of people, do you mean 0.3% of Twitter users?
    - krapp 4y ago
      A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for. That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure for Mastodon. This isn't a zero-sum game.
      - edude03 4y ago
        It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.
        krapp 4y ago
        Assuming that Twitter doesn't crash and burn in the next week or so, and assuming Mastodon doesn't draw enough users to create its own network effect, sure. But then, people don't always act according to a single metric. Mastodon doesn't have ads and it doesn't follow a single moderation policy. I can see people sticking with both for different reasons.
davoneus 4y ago
I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example: You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'. Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back. The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature. Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.

hn2017 4y ago

We need more alternatives to Twitter. Hopefully one of them will excel. Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.

aaron_m04 4y ago
> Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts. That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.

LanceJones 4y ago

With Twitter usage apparently climbing, why is this important? Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?

InCityDreams 4y ago
>Twitter usage apparently climbing, Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?
- kibwen 4y ago
  And according to whom? Musk, who has no legal, economic, or moral incentive to be truthful?
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
Idk if you’re an engineer or not but there’s an aspect of “reading the room” that your comment fails to capture. You can take the superficial tweets on usage for what they are but there are larger things happening around those specific statements that would lend themselves to “Twitter is actually dying this time.”
VikingCoder 4y ago
There are people who are happy to use products that benefit Elon Musk, and reward his behavior. There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.
samwillis 4y ago
I don't believe it's climbing in the real sense. I think people like watching disasters unfold, they are taking to their Twitter feed to see news of its fast moving downfall. Refreshing to see what the next ridiculous move is, and getting that dopamine hit when it happens. It's not sustainable growth.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Also people logging in to export their history count as DAU.

personjerry 4y ago

Oh it's another ad disguised as an article

theCrowing 4y ago
it's called Advertorial :(

desireco42 4y ago

I read it till waitlist... I get it but also... I don't want to wait, by the time they send me email, I will forget what it was. I think there is a place for, not Twitter alternatives, but for newer ways how we can be social and connect and discover interesting people. And I do welcome those explorations and want to support it, but waitlist is not something I enjoy.

bogwog 4y ago

Elon Musk is a clown and it would be very entertaining to watch him lose $44B as Twitter crashes and burns, like slipping on a banana peel. ...but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting and I want to see it work out. I don't know much about this Noam Bardin person, but considering Waze is just another bottomless pit of data collection, my hopes aren't very high that this will be anything notable beyond having a unique page layout. I don't see a reason to use it over one of the many Mastodon instances. Maybe Twitter's problems are due to the traditional business model, and shifting towards paid accounts might change that. Or, it might make them 10x worse. Idk, but it's certainly the most interesting thing happening in social media right now.

macspoofing 4y ago
>but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting Who says this platform wouldn't be reliant on advertising? You need to provide free access to build your social graph, and then you need advertising to monetize it. Paid subscription is more of a supplement at best (think YouTube/YouTube Premium).

ceres 4y ago

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point anyone who willingly joins a new VC funded social media monstrosity is just a masochist. Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!

jqpabc123 4y ago
Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.
- ttul 4y ago
  Indeed. Ask anyone running the general discussion group for a small town. The difficulty of effective, fair, and efficient moderation cannot be overstated.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    Ask anyone running a general discussion group for a neighborhood. It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation. Most people eventually quit if they're not being compensated in some significant way. On the other hand, if anything goes it can probably be fairly hands off.
    - ceres 4y ago
      > It consumes a lot of time/effort if you do any sort of active moderation And yet some Reddit mods manage subs with 10s of thousands for… free.

0x445442 4y ago

I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.

altacc 4y ago
It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...
- macspoofing 4y ago
  Who likes Twitter culture?
  - thinkingemote 4y ago
    This is the key perceptive question!
  - stusmall 4y ago
    There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical mind about what they posted. I think a big part of what "Twitter culture" is it was many things for many people. Some people use as a place for weird shit posting, some use it for porn, some enjoy bias confirmation, some enjoy the drama and beef. I guess some people enjoy anime avatar reply-guys since some of the new offshoots seem to be catering to maximize them. For me Twitter would have been better if it didn't have any of that but I get that using it as basically a shitty, short-form substack isn't the most popular usecase. So what I liked about "twitter culture" is that all of these things could co-exist on one site and just curating who you followed could dramatically change that experience. With a lot of the current drama some of the more serious people are leaving. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but I don't expect my use case to stay intact.

nitin-pai 4y ago

“Protocols, not platforms” is the way to go, as Mike Masnick lays out.[1] What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse. [1] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

globalise83 4y ago

There was probably an opportunity a few weeks ago to create a social network only for the elites who could prove that they had a Twitter verified account (e.g. by putting a verification code in the bio / description). That would create crazy amounts of FOMO! But unfortunately now anyone can get one, so it's not as attractive. :)

mirzap 4y ago

How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternative" narrative - twitter gets more user base and more likely is going to succeed in future iterations - while "alternatives" get stuck in the past. How many failed startups tried to go against facebook, as "social networking alternative" as a rebellion to some bad facebook press, policies or scandals? How many of those succeeded? None.

pjc50 4y ago
The current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow. (posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is what Elon means by free speech)
- BitPirate 4y ago
  If you post the correct link which is joinmastodon.org there's no problem.
- discardedrefuse 4y ago
  That's because, up until a few weeks ago, joinmastodon.com was a spam domain. It's only recently been purchased and redirected to the real domain: joinmastodon.org
jeffbee 4y ago
There are many counter precedents. The most prominent in my mind is Zoom: exactly like all the others with only slight differences, zero-to-100% market share in 3 years.

bedhead 4y ago

[flagged]

KerrAvon 4y ago
[flagged]
- macspoofing 4y ago
  To be fair - OP isn't wrong. There has been a lot of "pearl-clutching" about nothing-burger issues since 2016. This era has throwbacks to the 80s moral-majority/church-lady culture, with a sprinkling of "The Satanic Panic" and "McCarthyism".
  - bedhead 4y ago
    Yup. Everything flipped. The left is the new religious right only on steroids.
- bedhead 4y ago
  There is no right wing media ecosystem. There is Fox, which I’ve literally never once in my life watched and have made fun of for two decades. Then there are a bunch of rinky-dink outlets no one even knows. There is however, a giant, ubiquitous, controlling ecosystem of liberal media and news and information outlets who we all used to rely on for being at least pretty much objective which I’ve grown insanely f-ing sick of and find beyond disgraceful (they’re all now far worse and more shameful than Fox ever was) since around 2016
dale_glass 4y ago
Oh fine, I'll articulate why. Musk doesn't know what he has bought. He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that make nobody happy, but keep trouble at a minimum. Musk is obviously incapable of doing this. He just started, and immediately spooked the advertisers. Then he started whining, and threatening both advertisers and his own employees, apparently not realizing that he has no real power over either. It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. At this rate I expect him to be hit with fat fines from the EU, demands from various other countries to comply with their rules, piss off advertisers, run into trouble with illegal content of various kinds, and have stability issues and security exploits. It's not that it offends me so much to have a conservative driven platform. It's that the man is clearly incompetent and flailing, and as amusing as that is to watch, it's clear the platform won't survive it so alternatives are needed.

phendrenad2 4y ago

It seems deeply ironic that Noam is starting a Twitter competitor, when he's mostly well-known for some comments he made about lazy startup employees which seem like something Elon Musk might have said. But then you realize it's not ironic at all.

macspoofing 4y ago

This manifesto is generic enough that it aligns with all existing social-network platforms. So this Twitter alternative is bringing nothing new to the table. Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers. Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.

mattdesl 4y ago

Fleeing one centralized platform into another is futile, and will end in the same problems. I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others: https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago

mastodon is surprisingly good, imo. I joined about a year ago. It worked fine, but it was basically dead for me. I didn't know who to follow and I couldn't find anything interesting to do. Everything changed in the last couple of weeks. It's busy now. People are posting and interacting. A large chunk of German twitter moved over to mastodon completely. And a good chunk of electronics twitter is also now on mastodon. My timeline is simply a chronological order of post of people that I follow, no suggested post, no advertisement, etc. It's very possible the whole twitter-is-dead talk will be over in a week. But mastodon has some real traction.

dqpb 4y ago

> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; > Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them. If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?

lbriner 4y ago
This is the hard problem in a nutshell and one thing that no-one who proposes "an alternative Twitter" seems to get. Extreme free speech? Racism? Maybe. Racial hatred? No, I'm a bit uncomfortable now. Someone questioning the mainstream? Seems harmless; because lizards are taking over the world! No, you are mad but the person who thinks that Soros is taking over the world is welcoime because that sounds less mad. Good luck.
7952 4y ago
He is a social media user, no more, no less. The problem is when we start attaching authority to that. And the less anonymous the platform, the more authority has an impact.
dqpb 4y ago
lol, what do the downvotes even mean in this context? Is this a stupid question?

Entinel 4y ago

> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Growing a garden on someone else's land means I don't need to worry about the upkeep. To continue your metaphor, leasing farm land is literally a thing people do. I genuinely do not believe the large majority of people want to worry about hosting, community management, etc etc. The people that do are in the extreme minority. >To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. You are using Hacker News right now because there is an audience and community. That is the upside to the user.

mgdev 4y ago

Pretty sneaky, using your referral link in this context.

Jerry2 4y ago

NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse. Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard. [1] https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/

standardUser 4y ago
Until Mastodon finds a way to let the average user sign up without any friction, it will never be more than a small niche service.

adastra22 4y ago

> Write posts of any length and share them broadly So, not Twitter. The 240-char limit of Twitter is really essential to its eclectic dynamic.

jdelman 4y ago

> "Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad?" Nostalgia alert. Social media used to provide 100% value all the time? Trolls didn't exist 10 years ago? "Rational debates" were thriving with a 140 character limit? When Twitter became a resource for learning about research on Covid and coverage of protests worldwide - surely subjects that would be fair game on "Post"[0] - I was certainly getting a lot of utility, but I can't honestly say I never felt angry or sad. This all just feels incredibly naive, like we can just turn back the clock. [0] Speaking of nostalgia, I long for a future where company/product names aren't just dictionary words anymore.

pessimizer 4y ago
It's the fake past, like back in the day when people actually cared about craftsmanship, customer service, and their lawns, and weren't so offended all the time or so scared of hard work.

barbazoo 4y ago

Billionaires gotta billionaire. Instead of promoting a healthy, sustainable platform, everyone just wants to lock people into their walled garden to extract money from them.

racl101 4y ago

Wasn't what's name .... Jack Dorsey making some alternative?

Finnucane 4y ago
Like a divorced dad making up for past grievances with his new, younger spouse.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Why? Why even get in this race, there is nothing to win. Win by not playing, and just give those millions of dollars that were about to commit to losing anyway to local schools, community centers, food banks, and hey maybe just buy housing for the homeless (oh no, so unfair! they got a house for free! All they had to do was be on the brink of death every single day!). Do something good with those dollars instead.

WC3w6pXxgGd 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

All i see is he started a wait list.

whitelabrat 4y ago

IRC forever!!!

ss108 4y ago

"Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?" No lol, wtf is he talking about

harel 4y ago

The waiting list is shortened if you invite 5 friends with a special link. Whomever posted this basically invited all of us. I think twitter's "high" traffic right now is akin to a traffic jam on the motorway because people slow down to watch that horrible terrible accident...

tokenadult 4y ago

OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup. I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.) Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.) The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will. Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.

dang 4y ago
Nice to see a tokenadult comment after I don't want to check how long!

algurithm 4y ago

More options are a good thing, but his Twitter alternative might be misidentifying Twitter's actual strongest point. Allow me to elaborate and tell me if you disagree, but this is how I feel: I never used twitter because of the social aspects. At all. I'm not there because I want to have a chat. I just use Twitter to get new artwork from artists I like or follow game devs who post their content there. For me, Twitter's real value was always content sharing. The social aspect was tolerable at best and detrimental at worst, which is why I don't want to use an alternative explicitly focusing on the social aspect. What I really want is a Twitter with content creation focus, instead of social. I think most alternatives are focusing on the social aspects, so I thought I should share this sentiment.

jwmoz 4y ago

What if, someone just wakes a twitter clone, charges a small amount, keeps it simple, makes some profit and doesn't get greedy. Every decent tech thing over that last 10 years once it goes big and vc and markets are involved it goes to shit.

Entinel 4y ago

I'm very interested in seeing how Twitter dying shakes out in terms of social media. Frankly, I don't think people "get it" and that includes me. From where I sit no one wants to self-host, no one wants to be advertised to, but no one wants to pay for anything either. As always, one million "alternatives" will be made, they will die one by one in some Squid Game style battle royale and then society will choose one and the cycle continues.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

How many twitter articles does hacker news need a day? I get it, you're social media junkies and your main supplier is now giving you tainted stuff. I'm sorry but that has almost nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with your own shortcomings.

mikeryan 4y ago
I mean, if nothing else, it’s a fascinating business case study playing out in real time.

afhammad 4y ago

So is https://twitter.com/gabor https://twitter.com/gabor https://t2.social/ https://t2.social/

afhammad 4y ago

He wasn't the founder of Waze, he was the CEO.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

Sounds awful. I don't go on Twitter to "learn" from my betters (presumably, the founder includes himself in that category). If you look at FTX, you have these supposed "journalists" quoting from "Autism Capital" on Twitter...that is where their sources are. I am guessing "Autism Capital" is some random guy, in his mom's bedroom, making no money from this...and there are journalists taking down $80k/year just ripping stories from that. The question this should raise is: why do we need the journalists? These people are pointless, they don't have interesting opinions, they are just information tollgates, Twitter removes that friction totally (equally, I worked in finance, I started working just before the Twitter age and assumed that everyone else was very diligent/knowledgeable/doing lots of good research...and then all these people hopped onto Twitter, start outputting more information, and you realise they are just total idiots...which I also realised after working in the industry, Twitter exposes the man behind the curtain). Give me the anonymous cesspit. If it makes you mad and upset, don't go on there, that is on you. The doctor can't be blamed for the needle being sharp.

cwkoss 4y ago
The psuedojournalists you are referring to are worse than simple plagiarizers: they share content they lack the capacity to analyze, but still add their own spin. I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  They are also overwhelmingly people who get triggered by random people they don't know online, and are pushing for this narrowing of the information space so that their safety/income is maintained. You are right, the spin is as bad as the copying. Always an agenda, that agenda is never made explicit, every event, same underlying cause. It often seems we have the worst possible people in that role of relaying information (and I do actually feel more comfortable with someone who doesn't pretend to be either objective or, shock, even particularly serious).

vannevar 4y ago

Twitter shouldn't be a service, it should be a protocol. Technically, when Twitter launched it didn't offer much you couldn't already do with email and listserv.

fourstar 4y ago

>Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter? No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.

Nifty3929 4y ago

I'm really excited to see competition in this market. I wish Twitter the best, and I hope Elon succeeds with that. I also hope Noam succeeds. And maybe they will push each other to be better for users overall. One fear I have is that platforms will divide along ideological lines and inhibit respectful disagreement and open conversation. We seem to be short enough on that already and I really don't want it to get worse. It's so important for us to acknowledge that the people "on the other side" are also smart, well educated, and want the best for people - just like we do.

biggerChris 4y ago

That’s cheating. Your link is a referral link. Stop it.

orthecreedence 4y ago

Cool! That's what we need! TWO Twitters!! One wasn't useless enough. How about we take all that time and energy and build a few fission plants.

hengestone 4y ago

Haven't seen discussed yet, but for me the killer feature would be the ability they mention to be able to pay for individual "articles". I.e. maybe a federated micropayment news feed where i don't have to subscribe to NYTimes AND WaPo, AND (many others), but only pay pennies for individual stories.