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Comment by 746F7475 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. What is the benefit of using twtxt? Ok, it's decentralized, but what actual benefit does that bring? Just anybody can't see what you are saying? But is the communication encrypted somehow?

Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea and I'm all for building stuff 'just because', but I wouldn't it be just simpler/better to create cli wrapper for Twitter? (which probably exists). That all being said I'm not a big Twitter user, so maybe I'm missing some vital point here that is obvious to regular 'microbloggers'

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> What is the benefit of using twtxt? Ok, it's decentralized, but what actual benefit does that bring?

Right now Twitter is up in arms about proposed changes which make users not have control over their feeds; there will be algorithmic curation so you only see the most popular content from your followers. "Just create a CLI wrapper" only works assuming the APIs are not effected by the changes they are making to the main product, which doesn't really make sense.

So why not just make a Twitter clone? As in a website that had same functionality? This extra CLI abstraction will just make it harder to adopt, which again might be by design, but at that point a question comes to mind: why not just start a newgroup-ish email feed?

Again I don't quite get what Twitter is for, so maybe I'm missing something, but at least the publicity isn't an issue here since this seems to make it pretty hard to actually find people to follow.

> why not just start a newgroup-ish email feed?

Have you ever tried to run a mail server before? It's a nightmare wrapped in a fiasco.

Maybe because some people want a Twitter alternative that isn't under the control of a single individual, company or group? There's an increasing amount of talk about Twitter trying to censor things that the management doesn't like hearing about, so perhaps some people might prefer a service or system where no one can control what can be said.

Still a few issues though. Like how to overcome the whole network effect thing. These systems aren't very useful unless there's a large audience, and it's hard to draw a large audience if no one's there to begin with.

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