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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

That would be nice but who would pay for servers? I would love an "Open Twitter" built on standard protocols and implementable by anyone, however if SMTP and NNTP are any indication, most people prefer convenient silos over open solutions. And the reality of a hostile internet mean that there is a need for active resources devoted to protecting any service from abuse.

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I've been thinking about how something like this could be done in a completely distributed way, I think I've even seen some research implementation of it. In any case, it'd be interesting...

Hmm... http://twister.net.co/ maybe? The biggest issue is going to be mobile, but if you have enough people firing it up on servers and stuff, you'd probably be okay. And then of course you realize that there's also the even bigger issue of actually getting people to use it. You're fucked there unless you have some serious marketing talent, which most people capable of writing such a thing in the first place lack.

> most people prefer convenient silos over open solutions.

Most people don't care one way or the other. They just want it to do what they want/need.

And they also want their friends to be on the service. That's what's really important, and why a lot of open solutions didn't take off. No one they cared about was using them.

Isn't the problem with NNTP that people are being pushed away from it rather than not wanting to use it?

Something like wikipedia would be nice.

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