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Comment by Tipewryter | Hacker News Reader

Can you name some alternatives? I am not aware of any.

Please note that I explicitly said "centralized". Because decentralized solutions like Mastodon have not resulted in viable alternatives for the average user so far.

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ActivityPub and the Fediverse of which Mastodon is part have absolutely resulted in viable alternatives. I use the network for probably 90% of my online social interaction. It is far superior to any alternative I've found so far, mainly because I can publish freely, cannot be banned from the network, nobody has to have an account to see what I say, and it is actually a network, not a website calling itself a network. I can think of no way to reach millions of people that is less restrictive than this network.

What is the difference? Centralization applies only to moderation policy.

Minds, gab, and Parler come to mind. There are certainly others.

Interesting.

Looking at Minds, I already see a big flaw: All posts are under the /newsfeed/ namespace.

So instead of

    /username/1234

your posts are here:

    /newsfeed/1234

I don't think users want to get "robbed" of their posts like this.

There also is no embed functionality. For Twitter type shoutouts it is absolutely vital that they can be embedded around the web.

Username in status url and “embedibility” are good features to have but i don’t think they are causal in determining whether or not an twitter clone reaches critical mass. Maybe they are though. You should build an alternative!

Fun fact: the user part of a Twitter URL isn’t important. You can replace it with any other user.

The latter two are dominated by people who've managed to be too fascist for Twitter, which is quite a feat.

> 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.

You proved that point

Is the person you're responding to wrong? You can't just slap a conspiracy label as if that somehow makes what they said wrong

Yes they are wrong. There’s no evidence that either of those platforms are dominated by fascists. The claim is as frivolous as the claim that HN is dominated by fascists.

How so?

Parler is a no go for me partly because I don't like ideological monoculture, but mainly because users have to have an account to even see what you say. IMO this makes it worse than Twitter, you shouldn't publish your thoughts somewhere with conditions on who can see what you say.

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.

> users have to have an account to even see what you say

fwiw, I thought the same until recently but discovered they are visible with the following format:

https://parler.com/profile/[username]/posts

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