Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
If Twitter crashes and burns, what existing or in-development social media site could "replace" it?
It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're at. Journalists, politicians, business people, elites more generally etc. all use this thing to coordinate what they think about basically everything.
So you're really asking "how do I create another semi-public elite coordination system that could step in if Twitter falls apart".
The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me?
The politicians ... but not the ones on my side?
The athletes ... except for my team?
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[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-wor...
Elite can also mean a person or group of people that is better at something than others, there's some obvious overlap with the definition above, but it is less useful in the context of political elites, which we are mostly talking about in the context of Twitter.
The President of the US / any country on earth is an "Elite". Despite many claiming to fight against the Elites.
> Trump famously was never really a part of the NYC wealthy elite
However, he clearly was part of the NYC wealthy elite. His towers would get planning permission, politicians lobbied on his behalf, he was in Whos Who, he was invited to the Met Gala every year.
It's unsubstantiated because it's easily proven wrong. Twitter was home to Trump's presidential campaign. It's home to groups like ISIS, the Western output of the Kremlin, of the CCP, of Bolsonaro. Of Musk.
There is a point to be made about the changing role of Twitter. In my mind it is for some definition of 'elites' - but for expressing their views to their followers, not for coordinating. Sad that this opportunity to discuss such has been co-opted by conspiratorial rhetoric.
Well not necessarily. In some contexts that may be how it is used - I've heard GOP hardliners in the US using it this way. But for example the "elite" in the UK would largely refer to the right-leaning upper-class who attended "public schools" (note: discussed on HN previously, public school == very fancy, expensive, exclusive private schools) and Oxbridge, and who stumble into well-paid careers in finance and politics. I wouldn't say religion is a big part of it - both Jacob Rees-Mogg (Catholic) and Rishi Sunak (Hindu) would be considered members of the "elite", but their religious beliefs are orthogonal to their place on the class hierarchy.
The best answer I saw in this thread was from "bakuninsbart" but it was downvoted and appeared in greytext so many won't have seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bakuninsbart
English countries like UK and USA are shaped around 'clubs'. You can only join one if you're appointed
Japan has a set of corporation leaders who exchange informations, who came from families.
And some countries like France are being weird. There, your social status isn't decided that much by your family, but by which college alumni you belong to.
As an engineer, for example, you hit a glass ceiling if you don't come from a few specific schools that have a network. Join Paris X to be in the board of a large company. Join The Mines to be a well paid engineer in these large companies. And graduate from the INSA to still be an engineer, but the proletarian kind in consulting firms, which is ironically not so bad to continue build a network.
You can't even really apply to phd either when you graduate, as you're recommended by your school researchers to other coworkers, as gifts of goodwill.
The most ridiculous is the standard to be a high ranking politicians like presidents, ministers, or CEOs. In the 20 years before 2017, they used not only have studied at the same school, the ENA, but where mostly from the same prom : 1978-1980, the (in)famous Promotion Voltaire. News articles about them are all over, but in French, because the topic interested journalists at some point. They were giving each others formal orders of merit, and they are retiring and being replaced by the Senghor prom, from 2004.
So in various contexts, 'elite' is a club you can't join because of who you are at a specific moment in time, and not just skills. It makes decisions about you, and you can't influence them.
This reliance on networks is why I don't like current social media like LinkedIn or Twitter. It just emphasizes networks, instead of allowing everyone to join and publish. And I don't like 'federated' social media either, because they're the same. I feel like even mainstream media like radio or TV allow a better blend of news, made by journalists, who can invite whoever has something interesting to say.
So for me it's an open question ! I didn't like Twitter, and I don't know what I would prefer.
Maybe I would like one of these projects that aimed to build a platform for local citizens.
Let's check out what they do in Taiwan, the digital democracy.
For context, the ÉNA was a civil service school, i.e. it was for French civil service what West point is for the US Army.
What does that mean?
(Edit: wording)
Reddit downvote and twitter out of context quotes.
HN isn’t much better.
Twitter is for tweets and not replies..
Never read the comments.
It's short and context free, which means it's only for soundbites, which is why it's popular with politicians and trolls.
Nobody uses it to coordinate anything, they just use it to announce stuff or just to shout. That's all it's good for.
And isn't that basically what social network is? I mean, including real-life social network of just people knowing one another and talking.
In the UK this is done over Whatsapp. And occasionally email (see Suella Braverman bravely leaking confidential documents, getting sacked, and getting rehired). Their twitter content is the output of that process. You can see MPs tweeting coordinated statements.
If twitter has any value it's been in enabling all sorts of random communities, especially marginalised ones, to have a voice and coordinate. That was its role in the Arab Spring movement, for example. But there's a limit to how far that can go.
(People always forget that there are entire subcultures they aren't aware of on Twitter which you only see when they achieve viral escape. It's a gain-of-function lab for viral content)
I'd agree that this is one of its functions - albeit an emergent one, in that the "elites" probably didn't anticipate it going this way.
Its also an amplifier for outrage, from the personal level ("look how bad this sandwich is") to the political (organised, structured disinformation). And its also an addictive scratching-post for certain groups (mainly journalists and pols, but also narcissists like Trump and Musk and Ye). And probably other things too.
* a purveyor of short announcements ("news-breaking tweets from politicians and celebrities") and shared content. [1]
* a purveyor of advertising. "Twitter's revenues are mainly derived from advertising rather than its user base." [0] "Advertising services generated $4.5 billion, or about 89%, of Twitter's revenue in FY 2021. [...] Twitter generates most of its advertising revenue by selling promoted products, including Promoted Ads and Twitter Amplify, Follower Ads, and Twitter Takeover, to advertisers. [1]
* a speculative investment whose investors want to maximise profit. "Listed on the New York Stock Exchange for just under nine years, Twitter has posted a net loss every year, except 2018 and 2019 when it made a profit of just over $1 billion." [0]
* according to Musk, the product could be a "public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive [...] extremely important to the future of civilization." [0]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-twi...
We probably are simulated from the Twitter in the Other universe.
Sure, reddit has a karma system that incentivizes cleverness, but it's also designed for longer form conversation in a way Twitter can't possibly replicate. The pseudonymity also encourages vulnerability and openness in a way Twitter typically doens't.
There's a reason Google/Meta/Others train their AIs with reddit conversational data.
Reddit sucks at long form conversation. Every thread is stale and gone within 24 hours, so long lived conversations are basically impossible. Thus every topic that comes up is a rehash of the same super basic high level points over and over and over and over and over again.
The main conflict in social media is profit versus ethics... The platform costs a lot to develop, promote, and maintain... That is why these platforms often mislead users on their capabilities for social elevation. In reality, the platforms do nothing now in order to help users to be visible to new audiences of people... It is mostly users creating controversy, using bots, faking celebrity, or paying to promote themselves that increases their popularity on social platforms. There are reampant cases of accounts with mostly fake followers everywhere, the platforms do nothing to stop fakery because it only enhances their deceitful ideals that everyman can succeed on the platform. Reducing overhead for running the platform is a big key to ensuring that fairness can be upheld... Cloud hosting cost is increasing at wild rates... It's crazy how that is happening when technology costs generally decrease over time for infrastructure... And also citing how most host infrastructure now is trending towards being 100% virtual.
Creating a better social site means constant vigilance to assure fairness and equality, keeping the community smaller or thoughtfully segmented and more focused around individual topics, genres, or niches and creating channels for each of those that let users subscribe and unsub...
It pretty much boils down to something similar to Reddit I guess, but better though out... Without all the management corruption, bad UI, and oversimplified/overapplied moderation and spam/mod bots.
It is hard to maintain a huge site like Twitter with all the potential for liability, a new system of accountability for user accounts needs to be developed, while still maintaining a proper degree of anonymity... There are also rules like COPA and others that create huge complexities, but maintaining account anonymity kind of helps that, because e.g. - if the platform does not ask for a user's name and age in any way, there is no record of that user's real name and age stored on the platform... Unlike a site like Facebook, that catalogues every aspect of a user's personal ID and activity.
This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time.
But regardless I think the concept of federation being available to any software like Wordpress or Nextcloud is truly something we should treasure. It might not replace twitter, but it might actually turn the entire internet into one big social media federation.
My mind keeps putting ActivityPub into the context of the late 90s and 2000s when I was registered on countless message boards. Imagine if all those message boards could inter-communicate using a common protocol. That's where ActivityPub could lead us.
The usability aspect can be worked on, it can be worked around. The gain in internet freedom is worth the effort.
Right now it's clearly aimed at slightly more adept users. But imagine if Joe Sixpack could login to the modern equivalent of AOL, post a message, and that message is federated across hundreds of softwares and hundreds and thousands of sites and eventually Joe gets a reply from someone halfway around the world using a completely different software. That is what I find magical.
I have seen a few people write their own AP implementations, in their personal blogs for example. It doesn't seem hard. My suggestion to learn AP would be to integrate your own blog into AP first. That way you learn by doing.
So that's the true power of ActivityPub, that it can be integrated into any software. Wordpress has a plugin, Nextcloud is working on one, Gitea is working on some type of federation.
Since I only ever used Mastodon (and GnuSocial before that) I can only speculate how exactly they work but let's assume you post a blog post on Wordpress, that blog post is then posted using ActivityPub to other nodes where your followers are. It might be posted to an AP relay that just relays the posts it gets to all other nodes connected to it. Increasing the discoverability of your blog to people who don't follow you.
So that means all AP nodes connected to that one relay just received your wordpress blog post in their inbox and will show that to their local users. (you have to differ between local and remote users in the fediverse).
And then the remote users of other nodes can comment on your wordpress post, and those comments are in a thread so you as the owner of the wordpress post will get those replies back to your instance, which is your wordpress blog.
So what I just described is you posting a blog post from your wordpress, but receiving comments on your blog post from other softwares, other nodes, readable in the comfort of your own wordpress blog.
I'd like to see email integration, but with sender authentication and builtin encryption whenever possible, yet backwards compatible with email systems that don't support that yet.
I want blog comments integrated so you can interact with the blog comments on your social media platform and vice versa. Maybe this can be done through a combination of RSS and a common comments/messaging standard.
I also want it to replace WhatsApp and Signal with a simple messaging service that can still run standalone, but can also be accessed from other platforms.
So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve.
This is the giant elephant in the room. If we compare AP to e-mail, then all of us who have worked in e-mail ops know the trouble brewing.
And it has already started.
So yes having a federated social media brings new problems but it also brings new freedoms.
bad instances get treated like spam email sites.
It would be nice if people had some hard online identity that this could be tied to, but we all know there's plenty of problems with that too. Still, social networks, even distributed ones, don't seem to have much of a spam problem so far.
I think federation will struggle because everyone will be allowed to participate regardless of the quality of their software. Nextcloud is a good example. They keep adding features and making releases, but can’t fix nasty sync bugs that have been around for a year [1,2].
What’s the use of a federated platform that’s unreliable and unusable?
1. https://syncloud.discourse.group/t/disaster-with-nexcloud-3-...
Whatever version of the protocol becomes widely used among the small existing userbase of whatever protocol wins the popularity lottery will gain support from that community, which will create the usual feedback loop of improvements and greater stability as more resources are brought to bear on making it work, and by the time the punters show up it'll be pretty well-baked, and some early adopters might get burned. I insisted on Betamax back in '83, and I had to live with Betamax till about 87. First world adolescent problems.
It's never been more evident that the social platforms as they exist today are an overall social sickness, in ways that every previous Threat To The Children that I've lived with (drugs, video games, heavy metal music, etc) turned out not to be. So, we have to move to something different or else just plummet into barbarism, which even with the current situation I am betting against. People want hot water when they turn the tap and they'll settle the hell down and beg to help bring it back if they get a real taste of missing meals en masse. Dog help any elites hoarding resources on that day.
On a practical and constructive note, someone else mentioned smaller, more locally-based platforms, and that is the only thing that seems workable to me as a way forward. I used to run BBSes in the 80s and early 90s, and was guilty of Digital Utopianism in extremis through to the naughts. The source of that utopianism was how good the old BBSes were at giving a loser like me a social community and real friends, and also how that experience was largely replicated, in a morphed kind of way, on Usenet and later in some, but not all, web-based forums. MySpace was my first real inkling that things were going very wrong.
I live in the Manitoba Interlake, and I've been pondering what a local, BBS-like web site, perhaps using ActivityPub in some way and focused on my area would look like, in terms of operation, preventing abuse, etc. The BBSes were kind of an underground society of sorts, but a largely benign one focused strictly on fun, and the fact that we were all in the same city and would likely have to face each other at some gathering enforced some basic politeness rules that vanished with the perceived anonymity of this place.
Back when I was a Sysop, I used to require an actual phone call before giving users leech access (ie. to the file section with the all the goodies). Not because I thought of it, it was just how we did things, kinda like that guy who did the Ted Talk where he was holding the printout with the names and addresses of "everyone on the internet" sometime in the mid-80s. We all had fake handles, absolutely all of us, but we all knew each other's real names, back then. I think anything less than that anti-anonymity will degenerate into some degree of whatever we end up calling this social jock itch we're all living through, so I'm probably gonna try putting something like that up for my local community. There's a new ISP deploying fibre right this moment, and I might talk to them about handling the hosting, and limiting traffic only to their network or traffic verified to be originating from this geographical area.
The solution to all this is gonna be small and widespread, not big and centralized, whatever the case.
People don't move from platforms, they drift away naturally.
I didn't move away from slashdot, I just found reddit suited my needs and naturally visited the site less and less.
and then, I didn't move from reddit to HN, I just used reddit less and less until I realized HN fit my niche more.
I still have my slashdot account, but it's been unused since 2014
with reddit, I deleted my account in a fit of depression... but hilariously I still visit the site regularly (much easier to track my various entertainments there), i just no longer comment there.
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I don't user Instagram because, I just don't... get it? Too old for it.
I deleted Facebook when I realized all my extended family was on it and I just didn't to see them on social media.
Who knows how I'll fare with Twitter. I rarely tweet (honestly, because I am afraid of speaking on the platform, public speech is dangerous in my country) but I regularly use it, because where else will I get my instant updates?
So I will go where the updates are.
Digg has entered the chat.
There are always people threatening to move, but rarely does it happen (remember Voat?)
Digg is an outlier IMHO.
But! About one or two years ago they relaunched and started publishing mildly interesting stuff that I typically wouldn't see anywhere else. I'm guessing this got them users, because in the last months they changed most of their titles to clickbait, the quality of the articles went down, and they added comments where I've never seen anything but spam.
I don't know who cursed Digg or why, but they clearly did a thorough job.
Where the “vocal minority” turned out to be everyone. Lol.
Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a software company, and just being honest I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far. If I do, maybe I become someone important in my field or part of launching some important project/company, then maybe I could be invited to Twitter. Kind of like those high end credit cards that one has to be invited to based on their income/asset level.
Then again, I have no idea how that would make money (besides showing ads to followers like me) so I'm back to just following those important people for now lol. No way I'm paying money to view twitter, I'm cutting down on how much I spend on these monthly subscription services.
check marks look tied to popularity, leading one to wonder why arbitrarily less popular accounts have check marks. "it couldn't be anything besides connections could it?" its natural to wonder that way.
the reason exceptions to popularity resulted in blue checkmarks is because the popularity was only a correlation. the likelihood of your account being impersonated is a primary driver of verification.
so impersonation is the cause, this is correlated to a desire to want to impersonate which is tied to popularity, but nobody needs to be popular to be impersonated.
there is also a way to game that by... causing the impersonation yourself.
I would say that its coincidence people place any desire and covet on verification. Without that, the 'controversy' disappears and it is replaced by utility and consumer protection.
Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. Seems like a reasonable and simple idea that can quickly chip into overhead costs while, itself, having near zero overhead. A million people being verified would be a quarter billion $ gross per year. And while a million may seem like a lot, it just circles back to where we began. They're monetizing narcissism, and that's a very safe bet.
I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society?
> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.
A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation.
B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind.
It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.
This is still Twitter you're talking about. Blue checkmarks are overwhelmingly associated with 'woke' narcissists stoking the flames of the culture war
No surprise Godwin disparages the use of 'woke', when he is most likely a 'woke-ist' himself.
> I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.
Accusations of virtue signalling get misused a lot, especially by people opposed to those important issues. But it's absolutely a real thing. I think the most notable form of virtue signalling is public prayer on TV by politicians. They want to display their piety in public for all to see. They're not raising any kind of awareness by doing so, they're just fishing for approval from the right crowd. (And of course this is exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus condemned.)
It's a word typically used associated with a whole set of vocabulary including "woke" and "social justice warrior/SJW".
It's meant to deride people talking about diversity initiatives, systemic inequalities, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.
The explicit implication of the term is that nobody actually genuinely cares about these issues, they just speak about them to virtue signal to their in-group (progressive/left/urban/etc) that they have permissible opinions and that they are not problematic.
Has Twitter said so on the record? AFAIK the only reportage comes from unnamed sources in an article from The Verge.
It's not that reasonable once you consider who the current verified state is actually assigned to:
- People with huge fanbases like popstars - sure, they'll pay.
- "Normal" people who are verified and known in a community? Unlikely - they're who twitter wants stay and write on the platform to keep others there. People should be paying to read them, not the other way around.
- Journalists / others verified because of their work - depends. But someone did a quick calculation for keeping everyone from a single publication verified (from WaPo I think) and the cost of that was basically unrealistic. (can't find the tweet, I'll link for specific numbers if I find it)
So if they want to destroy the "verified" brand and tax pop stars - that will bring money and alienate users.
Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens your heuristic for quality is going to break down very quickly.
This isn't a criticism of Elon's idea. Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. As a business strategy selling them makes a lot of sense; even more so if people believe they're buying credibility.
That's false, the owner has to be notable enough to get a blue check mark. Authenticity is just one of the requirements
That's false, you just have to know/bribe someone who works there.
It might have started out that way, but over the years Twitter also added behavioral requirements primarily aimed at undesirables. Most prominent case I can recall is Richard Spencer.
Neither have most of the blue checkmarks. Many of them cause more pain if anything.
Do you want your account to be verified? Do you have a personal or business website or blog that is associated to you? Then just add an <a rel="me" href="my social account"> to the page, add the link to your profile, and the connection is done - you have proved that you are the owner of that website.
Do we really need anything more than this?
Probably more useful with how many sites these days are JavaScript blobs that don't really transmit over static HTML anymore.
Reaching 3 - 5 friends who care is enough for me.
This hasn't been my experience of twitter at all, I follow far more unverified people than I do verified and I know I'm not the only one that does. Communities like football (soccer) twitter aren't built on a few large verified accounts but, as far as I can tell, by mass participation more akin to reddit.
That seems like a business idea. A mastodon instance without public registration, requiring manual verification, making crossposts to other platforms built-in and trivial. Once established, charging the rich for verification/access, while inviting the known and worthy for free to keep the standards up.
So like TV, circa 1980. Funny how a lot of us are kinda pining for something like that to come back. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, by the way, but I am very amused, in a gallows kinda way, cause it seems to me that we have smashed that bottle real good. Someone wished for an M80 and blew the bottle up with it while the genie laughed.
That whole idea of "important" people is looking pretty ragged right now. I can't think of anyone I trust to (a) know what's actually going on in any sort of expansive, globalized way, and (b) report that truth to me honestly, or even in a way that earnestly considers my real best interests. I have intellectual figures I trust to interpret the facts that come before them in a way I agree with and consider sound, some of whom do have public profile enough to disseminate those interpretations, but what facts are they interpreting, and are they actually facts?
I'm on Friendica so I can follow people on both Mastodon and Diaspora (which would be the drop-in replacement for Facebook).
Still, I think we need something better. I'd like to see a social network with all of that, and support for email, but with sender-authentication (to stop spam), builtin encryption, but also Whatsapp/Signal style chat. And easily shift to whatever mode you're most comfortable with. And maybe also integrate blogging a bit more. I don't like having to choose between commenting on the blog itself or on the social share of the blog post; those two should be integrated.
I see the current flock of distributed social networks as basically the testing bed that should lead to something like that. We're not there yet.
By choosing your hoster, you delegate content moderation capabilities for your feed to them. If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem.
I am not sure to which degree this is practiced/convenient in Mastodon currently, but its distributed nature enables this as an elegant solution to the content moderation problem IMO
But you lose all of your followers, so in practice this is never done. You’re stuck with the censorship imposed by your chosen instance operator. Most are more strict and less transparent than Twitter.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...
Wouldn’t that be something of quality between usual youtube and facebook comments? If all comments here on HN were from all over the internet, would you even sign up? (If you perceive HN as “social shares” of course).
Of course I don't want the pile of shit that the YouTube comment section often is (Google Plus' YT integration was probably their worst idea), but when someone shares a blog post, so I comment on the share and discuss it with my contacts on the social network, or do I comment on the blog itself so the blogger knows about it and can respond? I want to be able to do both.
It’s a good idea still.
It was approachable and silly. People didn’t take it seriously, but they weren’t intimidated by it.
Don’t underestimate the benefit of being underestimated.
That is not a great mental image for your product unless you're selling a bulldozer.
As to whether Mastodon has been successful in Germany (or any other specific country), there could be online sites that track rough estimates regionally. I do recall Japan really embracing things...but not sure if they embraced any stack on the fediverse, or if it was mastodon specifically. But, yeah, Japan is an example of at least one country that dove deep in early on. The main "signup" website has such a tracker of servers (the term "instances" is more often used), but these stats should only be thought of as rough estimates...because, you know, federation: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
We act like likes are votes, but anyone can create multiple accounts .... Imagine if we did democracy this way ....
The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost certainly not true. (Think about Snapchat's "no screenshot implementation" as a real-world parallel.) The only bots on the platform would be the most nefarious actors who are willing to invest in the arms race.
Any platform that solves this problem will have to take a different approach - probably assuming there are bots and then providing tools to allow humans to only interact with other humans they can reasonably trust.
My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion.
This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn't imagine a social platform holding the crown jewels like this ever not being a disaster.
You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.
I don't really see a way around this if the aim is to prove human-ness though.
I don't personally care if Joe the random person has access to an anonymous account*, but I do care if Joe the Russian dissident—whose entire ability to safely post points of view which disagree with his government relies upon it—has access to an anonymous account.
* I am not saying there aren't other valid reasons, including entertainment reasons, to have an anonymous account. But those aren't part of my main point
And even then, what does a photo of ID from some foreign country prove? That the person signing up had something that looked like legit ID? Or do we start building a global database of IDs of every human that is "government approved" and somehow not subject to corruption in certain countries?
Indeed, I'm leaning towards it's not possible:
- Even if you required government id, you'd get a market of people selling their unused accounts, or access to them.
- You can use end-to-end DRM, like iMessage, to rate limit and complicate access to accounts, but it prevents access to legitimate actors.
- Even if you magically solve it, it still prevents legitimate bot access, such as those that keep track of when Elon musks private jet is being used.
The older I get, the more I think we're all just holding it wrong. Like the war on drugs, you can't just hunt down the bad actors. Instead, social networks simply become what they incentivize. If you make "followers" and "influence" your inofficial currency, the spam and impersonation isn't exactly a mystery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that engagement optimization contributes to making spam much worse (think clickbait).
I don't think our current generation of social networks was designed with a solid understanding of game theory. Or perhaps it was, but the important findings were ignored because it tends to interfere with growth.
How would that translate to, e.g., email where spam and impersonation is a huge decades-long problem but there's no "followers" or "influence" to be gamed?
Remember when key exchange parties were supposed to be a thing ad we would build a network of trust and so on?
I don't know how you can say this, when they were/are one of the main drivers? Did anyone ban Hillary Clinton from speaking? No. But, nevermind characters such as Alex Jones etc, they banned the sitting president from speaking on their platform!
Whatever your political position, I find it amazing that banning opinions that you disagree with seems to be acceptable or even desired. It used to be that people would say: I don't agree with you, but I'll fight for your right to say what you want.
Instead, it seems everyone wants to live in a comfortable echo chamber, parroting the apparent consensus opinions. So it comes as a shock to them when someone says something different.
People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions, rather than insisting on an imagined right to fragile homogeneity.
> People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions
Why is it hard to accept the "diverse opinion" that children were shot and killed at a school shooting, and that their parents were not actors trying to steal your guns from you? Does it trigger you that you didnt need to form a crew and go round and set them straight?
Here is a diverse opinion for you - not everything that happens in the world is done by crisis actors trying to force you to have interracial gay sex while taking your gun from you and giving it to an illegal immigrant.
Is it ok not to believe that the government there to help?
Can having an unpopular opinion (opinion, not an action) be hateful? Does it demand action from self-appointed custodians of morality?
Do you know the truth? Do you know the difference between right and wrong? Is it ok to act against someone who says 'wrong things'?
Holding an opinion is not an action.
Going on twitter and banging on about your opinion is an action.
Expressing your opinion, even on twitter, is an act of (written, typed) speech.
Preventing someone from expressing themselves, when they have done no wrong, is an action.
Preventing someone from expressing themselves is an action.
This is as per the golden rule, do no harm. If you speak, you are doing no harm. If you prevent someone speaking, you are.
Who has the truth? Is it the government and the media, or are they the worst of the worst? How would you know what the truth is? Is the truth a consensus, or can everyone be wrong? In this technological age, it is easy to conceive how a false message can be disseminated widely. How can you discern truth from reality?
In the absence of certainty, you have to allow the free flow of information. You might think that people are screening/filtering information for you, but it is surely evident that they can also be doing this for their own benefit?
Information is power, as it drives your beliefs, and then your actions.
In reverse, can you see how for others, the weaponisation has already occurred, and that they (trump etc) are already feeling the sharp end? Actions were taken to ban them after all.
Btw, I don't vote or care about the political charade at all, I'm not red or blue. My point is that if it is acceptable that the mainstream media marginalises certain voices and you don't complain when your side is winning, you are actually legitimising the loss of freedom of speech. And, in the end, everyone is a loser of we are unable to speak freely.
Thinking that everything is, is a symptom of consuming certain types of agitprop.
Isn’t exactly this happening on the other side of the fence as well?
But I don't see them banning anyone from speaking.
The idea is that people are able to say whatever they like. Their unpopular opinion may enlighten you to some salient information that you were unaware of.
Banning, imprisonment, fines, etc, should be reserved for actions. Speaking your mind should be free. Even on privately owned platforms.
[1] disagrees. [2] disagrees. [3] disagrees. etc.etc.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-o...
[2] https://jezebel.com/republicans-are-trying-to-ban-speech-abo...
[3] https://truthout.org/articles/gops-banning-of-books-and-atta...
But, no doubt, there are republicans who would do this too. I would say the exact same thing to them, as and when they start actually banning something or someone.
Freedom of speech is not a political position; try not to drag me into the gutter, please!
I was genuinely surprised the Brazilian election went as well as it did: there were reports of pre-election violence, but once all the votes were counted the losing candidate just conceded properly.
But America won't see or understand how terrorism works in the 2020s until it has another 9/11. At which point it will conduct reprisals against the wrong targets again.
But people go where people are, so we’ll see if it gets traction.
It seems like a lot of effort to go to when all I want is a social messaging app. I want to make an account once and be able to message anyone else on whatever app I'm using, not have to worry about whether my chosen node happens to be connected to theirs, not to mention that something like this [0] can happen and then apparently you need to personally handle migrating your data to another instance. These are technical details, not things that users should need to think about.
I don't see any federated messaging platform becoming popular until it reaches the point where users don't even have to understand what "federated messaging" means.
[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/
I think it's about time people in general started to learn about what it means to entrust the entirety of their communication on singular entities that don't have a shred of respect for them, their agency, their rights, or their well-being in any way whatsoever.
My personal belief is the ignorant trust of the tech world is on its way out, without severe legislation to protect the rights of the public. The right to own the data they produce (and prevent it from being held hostage), the right to privacy, the right to agency over what kind of communications and solicitations they are subjected to on the now-essential Internet. Dunno, just my thoughts but I see Mastodon (and similar federated networks) as absolutely crucial examples of the way forward.
1) It's hard to get on it, unless you know someone who is running an instance.
2) No-one I know is on it, and can't get on it since they don't know anyone running an instance.
3) The people who are on it all have names like xXxFuchsSturm1488xXx and think I want to see a constant rolling feed of politically-orientated furry pr0n.
2. When I joined I didn't know anybody either, but in a short time I connected to a lot of new interesting people. Now I have my own bots to relay content from people that are still on Twitter, and I have my own organic circle of followers - that's almost the best of the two worlds.
3. Muting profiles (and, even better, instances) is a good way of getting rid of a lot of spam/undesired content.
2) I don't want to connect to a lot of new interesting people, I want to connect to the interesting people I'm already connected with.
3) I don't see the fun in joining a social network where I need to mute 98% of all posts and profiles every single time I go on.
...is that not most experiences of twitter?
As for where to have an account, sdf.org has been around since the 80s and hosts a variety of useful things including a fediverse client (if memory serves, mastodon).
When it comes to muting, in my experience you don't have to mute 98% of the profiles. Spam usually comes from a handful of instances that are relayed to the instance you're registered - in the Fediverse instances can relay to one another, and tap into each other's feeds. If you have a lot of spam, that's usually because of the content from 3-4 relayed instances. Good instance admins usually intervene in this cases and mute that spam on instance level. If they don't, you can usually mute those few instances yourself, instead of muting every individual account.
Any evidence for this? Seems like this is something a few hundred or thousand even know about. That's a far cry from hundreds of thousands of millions.
There is an active and growing userbase though. The mentality is different than corporate social media; things move slower, including user growth.
> Last 6 months users: 2254133
> hundreds of thousands of millions.
hmm. 100 (hundreds) 000 (thousands) 000 000 (millions)
100 000 000 000.
Earth human population: ~7 billion.
7 000 000 000.
I didn't realize Twitter was expanding into the nonhuman market. Or are there more humans outside of Earth that no one told me about?
Far cry indeed.
I'm on the fence whether brands do.
https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...
Come on, use some common sense.
Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made
Maybe reddit, but seeing how their new ui is going I doubt they have the right people to make decisions there
Also, Twitter was is already dieing naturally. I don't think people actually want more Twitter
It's an image/video sharing site...
IG is really images-first, and would be a horrible platform for blogging or conversation without major changes.
links are the pillars of the web and these apps neglect them
I think most of Big Tech has betrayed the goal of the Web. The only really big, popular site that's true to the original goals of the Web is Wikipedia. Everybody else just tries to lock people up in their own walled gardens again.
Jack Dorsey (ex-Twitter CEO) is also working on a protocol with similar properties [2]
Neither can really replace Twitter right now, but they're interesting alternatives coming down the pipeline.
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr [2] https://blueskyweb.org/
> Why not use ActivityPub?
> [...] Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements.
It is true that their current approach of having "relays" as their main distribution system is not that censor resistant, but once you have that "network in the data" it is trivial to switch at any point to swapping encrypted files or even USB-sticks with your friends if you want.
Has ActivityPub anything similar?
Edit: and this is not just important for distribution, but for archiving. How many interesting Twitter threads and Youtube videos have been lost in the ether unless you manually archived them? And even if you archived it nobody can't tell if they are the same as the originals. With Nostr you can solve this with clients that do archiving automatically, and all the links stay "fresh" and shareable as long as somebody keeps the data.
Because we want it to be open and free - but we think we should be the ones that owns it.
As of now, the architecture is kind of flat - you have instances (about 10k for Mastodon), managed by admins, and admins all have the same rights and access control.
Bluesky wanted to go for a more semi-centralized "consortium of businesses" that separates the "small world" vs "big world" layer, or something a bit more hierarchical, and have strong authentication implemented on top of it. And that's fair enough - they could have easily implemented a system of keys and certificates hierarchically linked to the top node (the root node of the consortium). The underlying ActivityPub protocol would have remained the same, and they could have implemented whatever extension on top of it that supported source certificate checks, signatures, keys etc.
Twitter instances, or any other more "centralized" social network, could have shown posts with a green tick or whatever to tell that they are coming from a trusted source. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Diaspora and all the likes could have kept doing what they are doing now, their content wouldn't get the green tick if it comes from a server with its own certbot certificate that is not signed with a key generated through a certificate that can be linked back to the root certificate, but apart from that nothing would have prevented bidirectional integration between e.g. Twitter and Mastodon.
It was technically very feasible. And Jack Dorsey, as well as many from Twitter, was also sitting for a while at the same table that designed the ActivityPub specifications.
At some point they decided to leave that table because they wanted more of a say in the development of the protocol - they basically wanted to be more in charge, and shift the ownership of the underlying protocol from an open committee to a consortium of private companies.
Moreover, Dorsey also invested a lot of his money in crypto scams, and now he's that kind of guy with a toolbox full of hammers in search for something that looks like a nail. It's not a coincidence that a lot of the stuff that revolves around Bluesky looks a lot like a Blockchain.
I think these are the real reasons behind the development of an entirely new protocol. On a technical level, nothing would have prevented them from proposing some small patches to ActivityPub that wouldn't even have had to break back-compatibility. Everybody would have benefited from it - they wouldn't have spent a lot of engineering and R&D resources to reinvent the wheel, we wouldn't have had an N+1 protocol to integrate and write bridges for, and we would have finally had something like a truly native Twitter<->Fediverse bidirectional integration that would have benefited users on both sides. But they have different goals than the rest of the people working on these open protocols, and that's why our ways parted.
Ok, it's still on them to follow you on your new profile, but it's not like you have no connection between the old and new profile.
And I'm among those who want to improve this feature, so actual data exchange (followers and posts) can happen before the two instances during the migration.
A better question might be, what are you CURRENTLY using as a place to find communities (if this is what you're looking for) outside of Twitter? Answers to this question are going to be the most useful.
Every community is unique. FB is useless to me for most things, but there are some communities which thrive in FB groups. Some communities have a thriving Discord, other communities in adjacent domains might be more into Slack. Finding the right spots requires a bit of hunting. Reddit is great for some communities, dead to others.
What I like about Twitter vs any other network tool, is the random interesting stuff I can come across which is still somewhat related to people I follow. I don't see that replaced by any other platform. Niche places have more utility in some ways, but less randomness.
Maybe this will lead to the people who spend all day arguing about trivial BS on twitter to actually touch grass for once.
And then get rid of the other attention parasite bullshit sites TT, FB, Reddit, etc.
I think it’s more likely that users will move to smaller communities - Discord, Telegram & WhatsApp groups etc.
I’m surprised that Whatsapp hasn’t developed better community functions.
With a few baby steps they could move into the Discord/Slack space, Telegram channels, Twitter type interactions etc. And that’s before you get into a WeChat everything-app.
I’m not saying to add it all and change what makes WhatsApp good, but it could encompass a lot more social stuff (with small groups being the niche) and it’s absolutely ubiquitous.
It could also be a cash cow for Meta.
Twitter's only power was "eyeballs" and now there are going to be a dozen sites trying to take a cut of that.
(how on earth Twitter is going to make $1 Billion/year to pay financing is beyond my grasp)
If people leave Twitter, they’re not all going to go to the same place. They’ll go to different places or give up on the concept all together.
It’s irreplaceable. It’s an artifact of a very different time. I don’t think it can ever be recreated.
Twitter may shrink and even disappear in 5 years.
But that doesn't mean it will be ever be replaced by any 1 thing.
I think Twitter is a dead man walking. Maybe 6 months. Maybe 3 years. I don’t think it will survive.
Wanted to add that clarification.
Something like Mastodon is closer, but I don’t think it will replace twitter for a number of reasons (including the scattering of the Twitter diaspora to the winds as it dies).
I would like to know why neither ActivityPub nor the Matrix protocol were adopted. Maybe https://atproto.com/ will gain the necessary momentum.
1. 100% portable accounts (you can unilaterally move host, and you keep your social graph, and all links to your content continue to work)
2. You only see things from people you follow (the poster can also choose their audience)
3. Everything is end-to-end-encrypted (no server admin can read anything)
You can read more here: https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media
You can also write your own apps that leverage the private social storage: https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web
Please, Musk, keep that cesspool open so that all those flies will stay there - I don't want them in my neck of the woods.
Twitter and reddit share essentially the same purpose (content discovery) but reddit has much less noise and a better experience.
Instagram is where I follow my friends and the odd famous person.
Twitter has nothing to offer for me
So I guess it's going to be a matter of seeing which of the Twitter esque replacement systems wins out eventually, whether it be Mastodon, Blue Sky or Nostr.
I have a whole bunch of accounts in other venues, but most lie fallow. They are basically “placeholders.” I have to use a couple, from time to time.
All that, to say, I don’t especially care what happens to Twitter.
From where I sit, it appears as if a troll has bought it, and has declared that he plans to make it a troll playground.
Sounds like fun, but I feel it was basically there, already.
I have a lot of respect for Musk's tenacity and engineering prowess, but this is a different substrate.
People aren't as easy to manage as engineering challenges.
1. Decentralised
2. No Spam/manipulation
3. No censorship
(The boundary between what is classed as manipulation, and what shouldn't be censored will never be solved)
compared to my gmail, protonmail and other email clients/services, the signal-to-spam ratio on Twitter is less than 10% even for me — a nobody with <1k followers
Instead I believe that the difficulties with running social media companies come from not wanting these: there's a desire to control narratives, to push advertisements and to have central control. If these are the requirements the result is a behemoth of a company, which must do a great deal.
Meanwhile, if you have something noncommercial, where you just want some kind of forum where people can communicate with you and others, you can let them filter as they like, turning the knob down on any kind of spam-- because the user is running their machine and getting the benefit of the communication they desire, there is no need for any centralized control of the information flow-- the user decides what he sees, nor any need for advertisements, and because of the absence of advertisements there is no need for censorship or control in that regard. Furthermore, because messages are public the difficulties with dealing with things like e-mail spam disappear-- you will simply see what people think about a certain message, and you will not decide to see it if people in the tree of people you like like it.
I think internet technology is ready for this kind of thing. It's a bit of work though. To make a distributed WebRTC-Reddit where even people on phones can contribute to the communications network is a bit of work, but, I think, no longer infeasible.
No censorship doesn't mean everybody has to be forced to read your crap. People should still be able to block assholes. If you think that that's censorship, then it's your "no spam" and "no censorship" requirements that bite each other, and decentralisation has nothing to do with it.
There will come along something more usable and interesting than Mastodon but talking the same standardized language for interoperability.
Momentum is important, Musk irrumped now. Lots of minds are -thinking- about change. One could leverage that into springbooting something new
So Mastodon then? It is federated, but does that solve the problem? Or do a handful of clusters get really popular and then all the people that made Twitter toxic move in and corrupt the Mastodon nodes? Does Mastodon then create mechanisms similar to "verified" accounts, shadow banning, de-ranking algorithms, etc...? Do bots infiltrate Mastodon? Does the DHS Ministry of Truth coerce the popular Mastodon instances into having a government portal for monitoring and silencing posts? Are we entirely certain that governments did not pay developers to create Mastodon? I ask because that is exactly how Google project Birds of a Feather, Stanford SRI and Facebook project LifeLog, DARPA/CIA started. I honestly don't know the answer, just a gut feeling.
Is this just a technology problem or also a societal problem? Could it be that when the internet was small, there were little pockets of people forums, chat groups, etc that had mostly like minded people and they mostly sortof got along and were not popular enough to draw in coercion from corporations and governmental entities? Did Twitter connect all those pockets of people, corporations and governments leading to the inevitable drive to win the psychological control over the masses? Is there money, power or control to be obtained in winning the hearts and minds of the people?
It seems to me that this SP episode is describing a failure of American entrepreneurism. The script posits that a Walmart replaced a single store and grew fat and complacent, and when the Walmart was gone, everyone who was previously going to the walmart then flocked to that single store in South Park, rather than dispersing back to the many local hardware/grocery/dry goods stores they had shopped at in all their respective towns, before Walmart showed up, choked them all out, and imposed a new model where everyone who doesn't live where the walmart is now has to drive 20-60 minutes to do their shopping.
Granted, the people who had previously run these stores and watched their customers choose Walmart in sufficient numbers to let them die are probably not going to jump at the chance to reestablish their old businesses when only one Walmart in a vast network has been momentarily eradicated. Nonetheless, this is America we're talking about, and someone would... but not in Colorado, apparently, if you ask masters Stone and Parker about it. In their America, apparently nobody remembers that there was once a world without corporate behemoths reducing everything to a lowest common denominator nightmare, and once they are separated from it, they react like the chained in Plato's cave and set about recreating it like some sort of neurotic gollum-like cargo cultist, desperate for more cheap overseas goods.
I have never cared to live in the world they seem to inhabit, have to say.
It does the same thing. With less character limit, more functionality and equally huge (actually bigger) user base.
Sure we can all go and re-invent the wheel for the 800th time (I am still fond of my ex company myspace!) but if you just want to move away from twitter TODAY there's Facebook (and instagram)
Twitter barely made any money and VC aren't willing to invest in these projects, again.
We had this, but those days are gone. Forums used to reign supreme but was killed by a small number of centralized players. Due to the power of the network effect, I don’t see us going back to stand-alone forums anymore, unfortunately. I am skeptical about a federated system of individually managed instances due to the fact that all it takes is some minor inactivity/inaction on the part of the operator to render the service down for the count.
I would love to be proved wrong on this.
Maybe we are seeing the beginning of society putting less value on anyone and everyone having a global public podium? If all social media public content reverts to streams of ads, influencers, marketers, politicians, misinformation campaigns and every nutjob on the planet providing their "expert" commentary, then why bother? I can't see the signal of people I want to follow anymore with all that noise and I'm sure others see the same thing.
Social media has regressed to being a tabloid paper that talks about UFO's, bigfoot and what celebrity is divorcing or whatever. Its complete nonsense and mostly fabricated. Any new platform setup with similar features is going to regress to the same.
* Circles that were super easy to use and organize. All other social networks work hard to deter you from organizing and customizing your feed
* Enormous amount of good content and easy curation and sharing. People would make Circles of e.g. "Really Good Photographers" or "Interesting Physicists", and then share those circles. So in the morning I could go "Hey I'd like to read a bit about interesting physics" and click my Physicists circle, and in the afternoon I could say "I want to see some pretty photos" and see various photographers.
* It was good for customizing both content consumption as per above, but also content creation & sharing - I have a funny IT joke, I'll share it to my "Coworkers" and "Coding nerds" circles. I've done a really great wedding shoot this weekend, I'll share it to my "Photonerds" circle. etc.
It was genuinely amazing and awesome and perfect, for me.
Everything since has been actively moving away.
I'd rather have people divide into smaller sites, forums, news aggregators
Just to see how it'd work
- Asymmetric. You can follow people who don't follow you. The most important differentiator twitter has from facebook.
- Easy to get started writing, and even easier to get started reading, subscribing - you only need an email.
- Community. Substacks at least have comment sections. Still, not the same as twitter.
I think the basic of idea of substack - building it around email - has more potential in general. Maybe that's the future. Email is the open protocol for messaging and identity that everyone uses.
I think it'll be TikTok
Thinking about where you might post a link, Hacker News and Facebook and Reddit can sometimes work, when appropriate. It seems unlikely that Twitter will stop being a good place to do this?
Nothing to do with the Musk takeover being seen as a negative or a positive, just perfect timing in the sense that there is suddenly a lot of attention being placed on Twitter right now.
Why is this likely? Seems like it just does one thing well, and even that one thing now has serious competition from Youtube shorts (which are kinda better). Plus it's not cool anymore. Facebook seems to want to be a mega app but no one cares and it's just not happening because Facebook is a dinosaur.
Twitter very likely won't become Elon's X app, but I think TikTok is even less likely.
Elon has experience with Paypal. Payment and identity management is the core ingredient for an X app. Twitter gives him the user base, and he has overspent enough that everybody is aware of Twitter to easily acquire new users.
Somehow it became normal that big companies don't role out new features very often. That's not a given. Elon can reshape Twitter and turn its NASA-like development structure into a SpaceX structure. If Twitter runs like a startup it could be reshaped within months.
However, Elon could also create something like the Vegas tunnel which supposedly doesn't have the safety features to handle a fire very well. [1]
[1] https://reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/yeni5w/elons_boring_t...
Pretty much every TikTok creator hates the monetization and many are shifting focus to YouTube.
It's strange how since 2016 or so people have been trashing Twitter saying it's toxic, and now people want to protect it now the boss has changed, similarly seeing the worst.
I think Musk can only improve matters here. I don't mind if it crashes and burns, it's already a Bad Thing. I'd like to see it improve.
Each post has a chatroom instead of comments, with expected chat features and more.
Not trying to build a Twitter or X replacement, just a quality place for live discussion.
It's a platform for long form conversations. Not quite like Twitter but good for in depth discussions
I think the last thing we want is another site owned and controlled by a for-profit company.
Targeted ads by celebrities. That's mostly what it is these days.
Someone else mention journalists, but God do I hate "articles" fragmented as tweets.
but then I follow a lot of Russian and Ukrainian sources so that’s why. It’s very popular there.
I still don’t know how they make money though. It’s shady.
I have a lot of thoughts about it and would love to chat :)
you can get the latest news/tweet from on the ground reporters.
i don't know which social media platform can give me this type of update.
I remember kids had two profiles, MySpace and Facebook and you’d qualify wether you saw a post or messaged someone on which platform. Eventually, the center of gravity switched to Facebook and people stopped maintaining their MySpace accounts.
Are you spitballing or is that a wish?
Btw, you can sign up for their own client for Blue Sky here (beta waitlist): https://bsky.app/
1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...
Some people use it like those assholes who drive around neighborhoods blaring something out of their portable car megaphones.
I heard them recently while traveling through small towns in Eastern Europe.
They usually blare political rhetoric or advertising.
Don't really see how you can stop them or their Twitter equivalents unless by using a point based reputation system.
Then however we won't be able to say we are different than China as far as the social credit thing goes.
Once the box is open, it's difficult to find all the pieces that wondered around the floor.