Every twitter clone that tries to compete without first having the approval of the major media outlets will either be publicly ignored, belittled, or outright attacked.
Really, it's just that social networks work by having a lot of people, and lots of people are on Twitter because other people are on Twitter (I think there's an audience thing as well).
Though, to your point, I think Twitter has outsized influence for the same reason Google Reader did: loud nerds and journalists were always using it. Though now the politicians using it probably count for a lot too
Facebook did not grow this way, even though their relationship with the media is nearly indistinguishable from twitter’s today.
History is full of conspiracies.
> Really, it's just that social networks work by having a lot of people, and lots of people are on Twitter because other people are on Twitter (I think there's an audience thing as well).
The network effect is real, but it is not the only effect. Twitter and other tech giants now think that their role is to protect the world from information they deem wrong. As well, prominent people in media and politics are urging them to take on that role more expansively. Naturally, therefore, they will oppose competitors whose distinguishing feature is to have less or no censorship.
The media establishment does not look kindly upon those who seek to deconstruct it.
Do you have any examples of anything "they" "deemed wrong" which wasn't factually wrong? And not "alternative facts" bullshit, regular, proven facts.
Now, you place the burden of proof on me, assuming that Twitter is in the right by censoring information and demanding that I prove that their censorship is wrong. But why don't you place the burden of proof on Twitter? Why do you apologize for censorship?
In your other comments, you say that "Only China can stop China," and you say that the U.S. mustn't respond to cyber attacks by China, Russia, and Iran, or those nations might escalate, so we must look the other way when these nations infiltrate and attack us.
One wonders what you're after.
So don't worry about critical mass. Pick where you want to publish based on what is important to you.
I almost exclusively use FOSS, federated networks to publish my thoughts, the only exception being this site. I engage here pretty often because I like the quality of the discussion and the rule of only contributing if you have something constructive to contribute, but ideally this website wouldn't be a silo.
Critical mass seems important for exposure and personally I don’t think exposure is important unless you are seeking to maximize something that comes from exposure, usually it’s profit.
My comment was mainly to bring attention to what I consider the primary causal factor behind twitter’s critical mass.
And then in 2008 it ramped up for a multitude of reasons. A politician nobody had heard of somehow managed to mobilise a lot of support via a tech platform many hadn’t heard of, and get to a point where it looked like he had a legitimate shot at becoming US President. By early 2009 it was popular enough that Facebook updated their timeline to try and combat it, everyone was talking about their growth, and Ashton Kutcher was goading CNN into a competition to be the first account on the platform to have 1M followers (he was the first btw).
Old media was late to the game here and had to play catch up to stay relevant. I suspect that was also the tipping point though which changed journalism forever into this clickbait and eyeball driven economy. If anything Twitter inadvertently controlled old media, not the other way.
Please note that I explicitly said "centralized". Because decentralized solutions like Mastodon have not resulted in viable alternatives for the average user so far.
I've never used Minds and dabbled with Gab when it first came online only to find that it is as noisy and worthless a place to engage as Twitter is, possibly moreso.
fwiw, I thought the same until recently but discovered they are visible with the following format:
Looking at Minds, I already see a big flaw: All posts are under the /newsfeed/ namespace.
So instead of
/username/1234
/newsfeed/1234
There also is no embed functionality. For Twitter type shoutouts it is absolutely vital that they can be embedded around the web.
You proved that point