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Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords w
by quaintdev 26d ago
Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
- 0points 26d ago[flagged]
- ballon_monkey 26d ago[flagged]
- ohyoutravel 26d agoI think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
- ballon_monkey 26d agoNo. They don't have eyes, because its quite clear to anyone with half a brain that it's not a nazi salute, and is no different to the same hand gesture that democrats use. It's sad the loud minority still believe calling everyone a nazi or fascist bears any weight.
- r_lee 26d ago[flagged]
- ohyoutravel 26d agoThe comment is a lie. I live in a major US city. They marched through the city in 2025 (minimally) with white face masks, red armbands with the Nazi symbol, doing Nazi salutes. Saw with my own eyes or I would have also not believed it. Absolutely shameful.
- r_lee 26d agoElon did?
- ohyoutravel 25d agoAs in Elon Musk? Specifically? No idea, wouldn’t be surprised, but I have no evidence that he did. But the post I’m responding to said “No ones [sic] doing nazi salutes.” So I didn’t read it as Elon Musk specifically. I would suggest you’re adding that in your mind and should reevaluate your fascination with him.
- r_lee 25d agosure that I can disagree with, there definitely are people like that, there's billions of us after all but I'm pretty sure he was referencing Elon there, as in there's no such thing as him doing such a salute but hey, I can't even see the original post because it was flagged, like mine is now. so that's great.
- ohyoutravel 25d agoI do think it’s interesting that in a conversation about nazis where Elon musk hadn’t been mentioned, that’s the first place your brain goes. You heard “Nazi” and immediately thought “Elon”. Curious.
- r_lee 25d agohuh? that's literally the context of this thread. how did you conclude that Elon wasn't mentioned? Curious.
- ballon_monkey 25d agoOh sorry, to catch you up on the conversation. We are talking about Twitter, and we are discussing it on HN where the uneducated like to hate on Elon.
- ballon_monkey 26d ago[flagged]
- r_lee 26d agoI'm not really on either side that much but I just don't understand this overreaction, it's literally fascism, silencing the opposition and censoring others by painting them as nazis/Hitler iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs IMO whoever is doing that should get their flagging abilities taken away.
- ballon_monkey 26d ago> iirc your comments weren't even making any big statements, just giving out your simple opinions without even invoking any political beliefs Initially I did type out more, but I didn't want to turn it into an argument, so I kept its simple. I just don't like that the left keep spouting out that elon did a nazi salute when he didn't, and his gesture is no different to anything the democrats have done. But HN is frustrating like this. You try to keep it simple and neutral. Downvoted/flagged. You voice your opinion. Downvoted/flagged.
- afavour 25d agoYou’ve said a few times that it isn’t different to anything democrats have done. Can you point to some specific examples?
- ballon_monkey 25d agohagbard_c replied with a bunch of examples to the initial reply to me.
- r_lee 26d agodownvoting is expected, like on Reddit, but flagging comments like yours, that's a first for me if people are so convinced that you and Elon are both super Nazis or something then why not show everyone what vile things you've typed here (iirc it was just "it was not a nazi salute." or something like that)
- hagbard_c 25d agoThe same gesture was made by: - Mamdani, who in contrast to Musk does mingle quite a lot in anti-Semite cirles - Bernie Sanders, a Jew himself but that has never kept anyone from being called a nazi - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also often seen in anti-Semite circles - Kamala Harris - Elizabeth Warren, who later also supported nazi-tattoo candidate Graham Platner whom she called 'my type of man' - Hillary Clinton - ...and many others Of course the legacy press has excuses for all these nazi-saluting individuals except for Musk, calling these photo's 'coincidental' or 'taken out of context'. The truth is that none of these individuals, Musk included, made nazi salutes but that is not what the narrative pushes and with that unfortunately also not what this here site - HN - accepts. https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg https://imgur.com/a/C2JsMfg (the others) https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2PANC6Y/democratic-presidential-hopeful-sen-hillary-rodham-clinton-d-ny-address-guests-at-a-fundraising-event-in-chicago-tuesday-dec-18-2007-ap-photocharles-rex-arbogast-2PANC6Y.jpg https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2PANC6Y/democratic-presidential-ho... (clinton)
- r_lee 26d ago[flagged]
- caycep 26d agoif there's repeated statements and gestures to that effect on national TV and other mass publications, it's beyond "echo chamber" status...
- r_lee 26d ago[flagged]
- exceptione 26d ago[flagged]
- hagbard_c 25d ago[flagged]
- r_lee 25d agoI think it's also that Elon is such an easy target as he's terminally online and always replies/retweets weird and controversial stuff so all these social justice warriors pick the easiest target and point to some tweet/image and say "Nazi!" thinking they've done some great servitude to humanity and can now feel great about themselves. kind of like using paper straws and patting yourself in the back
- Larrikin 26d ago[flagged]
- r_lee 26d agoso I found 1. "you have said the actual truth" reply to some guy about the great replacement thing or mass migration? which was then followed up with an apology and he said it was one of the most foolish things he's ever done. 2. said George soros hates humanity 3. compared Trudeau to a Adolf Hitler 4. some WW2 photo with a Wehrmaht soldier with a caption as a meme 5. mocking those who called him a nazi by saying stuff like "bet you did Nazi that coming" considering all the other kinds of things he's done and posted on Twitter, I'm not convinced he's an evil nazi yet
- vidarh 26d agoNothing in that comment mentions force? Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal. Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- TJSomething 26d agoOne thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
- 786754335476 26d ago[flagged]
- kentonv 26d agoThe CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side. When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are. If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky. Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
- Tepix 26d ago> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
- kentonv 25d agoIt's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing. Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer. Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general. Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back? Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
- WhyYouLose 26d ago[flagged]
- copper-float 26d ago[flagged]
- KerrAvon 26d agoThere are pictures, dude. What is wrong with you?
- copper-float 25d ago[flagged]
- hagbard_c 25d ago[flagged]
- imadhinar 25d ago[dead]
- Izkata 25d agoWell, considering that never actually happened... He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
- 0points 25d ago[flagged]
- bigstrat2003 25d agoSomeone disagreeing with you on the interpretation of that event does not make him a Nazi. You need to take many steps back from the polarized thinking you are engaging in, because it ultimately harms you to lash out at people in this way.
- lovich 25d agoAh that makes sense. I didn’t realize Sieg Heil was German for “my heart goes out to you”
- phoghed 26d agoPay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days
- iwontberude 26d ago[dead]
- vrganj 26d agoI think adversarial compatibility is the way to go. Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
- phyzix5761 26d agoPeople want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?
- vrganj 26d agoWell that's the exact premise of adversarial compatibility. You just scrape the platform their friends are on and cross-post.
- nixosbestos 26d agoThere's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization". But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe". I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
- exceptione 26d agoI feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?
- OroPla 26d agoWikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part. People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption. It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
- rsynnott 25d ago> It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing. ... I mean, there _are_ (Conservapedia, Ruwiki, Metapedia, etc). It's just that the non-wikipedia generalist ones are so poorly run that no sensible person would ever use them, and usually have a fairly extreme ideological bent (there's a spectrum; Metapedia originally showed up because Conservapedia was insufficiently delusional for some peoples' liking) which requires them to wholesale make shit up (as the old joke goes, reality has a liberal bias). However, if Wikipedia ever goes all evil, I would assume it'll just be forked (there've been a number of prior forks, but except for Ruwiki they've generally died due to lack of interest). There are, honestly, serious economies of scale here. Unless Wikipedia actually has gone evil, well, no-one actually wants to maintain 66 million articles (No-one, say, wants to maintain 14,000 articles about bridges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_and_Tunnels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bridges_...). Specialist wikis work, but it'll take something fairly dramatic to break Wikipedia's dominance. (In an ideal world, I think this _would_ be more decentralised, but it's just very difficult for that to happen in practice. I think much more difficult than social media, which has never really _fully_ centralised in the first place.)
- quotemstr 26d agoYou're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.
- bilbo-b-baggins 26d agoYou’re an absolute helmet if you actually believe what you wrote.
- vidarh 26d agoThere are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them. Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen. A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
- OroPla 25d agoHow is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.
- AndrewDucker 25d agoPeople are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.
- vidarh 25d agoIf I refuse Nazis access to my house and other people chose to visit my house knowing I won't let Nazis in, I'm not censoring Nazis as I have no influence on their freedom of speech - they remain entirely free to speak elsewhere, to people who are willing to listen. I have no power to stop them from speaking, just to offer those who don't want to listen somewhere where they won't have to. Nobody is forced to join a Mastodon instance that censors Nazis - there are many that don't, or you can run your own.
- add-sub-mul-div 26d agoWe have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.
- ranger_danger 26d agoI suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening. And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
- buboh 26d agoWhat you're describing exists: Its called AT-Protocol and runs Bluesky. See more: https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/
- wrxd 26d agoHaving a protocol is not enough. You need also to be in a position to mandate that all the social media company over a certain size adopt it
- ranger_danger 25d agoYes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.
- shevy-java 26d agoYes - that is indeed a problem. The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
- tolerance 26d agoWhat are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace. Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
- pmlnr 25d ago> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture. This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
- tolerance 25d agoThen do you think that the average person's disinterest in moving to different platforms is a bad thing? How does this affect the ideal version of the web it seems like you're advocating for?
- trompetenaccoun 25d agoThose users indeed don't matter. The problem is the cool kids are on Twitter & co as well these days. Because that's where they have the most reach. Almost everyone on social media cares about reach, there isn't much of a point to posting things that no one reads. The old web was a very different place, it wasn't as centralized and there were significantly fewer people around. There were specific forums that you'd go to for specific topics. Say you were interested in West African dances - there was usually the one forum where all the West African dance nerds hung out. At most a couple of different ones. And they were very small communities. If there were issues with the admins or moderation users could and did do mass walk-outs and create a new place.
- mtrimpe 26d agoAll you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though.
- jcgl 26d agoThat’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network.
- fatal94 26d agoatproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.
- cringehn46 26d ago[flagged]
- coalstartprob4 25d agoatrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms
- deadbabe 26d agoThe platform is the people, not the tech.
- grebc 25d agoLikely the most astute observation in all 150+ comments.
- mitxela 25d agoThe network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need? If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
- Melatonic 25d agoProbably where twitter is going honestly. Not unlike MySpace pivot to music and Facebook being used exclusively for Messenger
- moolcool 26d agoAnyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”
- import 26d agoI was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform
- mikepurvis 25d agoFor a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.
- echelon 25d agoGoogle and Facebook fucked up the internet. The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?) RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000. Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth. Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same. Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again. I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now. AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product. We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them. And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
- cnr 26d agoOnly through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it
- gspr 25d agoWe could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs. Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms. It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
- specproc 25d agoThis is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws. We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
- rsynnott 25d agoThis is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)
- NelsonMinar 25d agoMigration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies. In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
- mitxela 25d agoIn the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit. Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit. Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS. And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory. I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
- deleted 25d ago
- mitxela 25d ago[dead]
- AlienRobot 25d agoThe first step is to actually make a better platform. The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
- viccis 25d agoA common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.
- tripleee 25d agoin the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive
- TiredOfLife 25d agoWhat is Digg or Myspace
- grishka 25d agoAdversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.
- crossroadsguy 25d agoThe average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.
- Barrin92 25d ago>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get. So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
- Staross 25d agoI think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.
- __MatrixMan__ 25d ago"Move," like these platforms are places... I think that were going to have to kick that mental habit before we have social protocols that are not susceptible to walledgardenification. Technology aside, the notion of a way of communicating being a place is fundamentally susceptible to bad behavior on the part of whoever controls that place. We need social media which are actually media. Speech, dance, watercolor... these are media and nobody has had to abandon them because of a poorly behaving owner. Twitter, whatever it is, is not a medium, nor is it a place.
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- BowBun 25d agoProblems that need to be solved - 1. Distribution - corps own the browsers 2. Platforms - corps own these as well 3. Cost - hosting, moderation, etc. You may very well be building a whole new intraweb
- __MatrixMan__ 25d agoAgreed. Let's get to it.