Ask HN: Is anyone working on a Twitter alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone working on a Twitter alternative?

I kind of wish I had spent the last six months building one.

Already exists, already has a ton of traction, decentralized.

I'm skeptical that it's a viable alternative for most people, who don't care about the fact that it's decentralised.

I actually only care because it makes it unviable for a takeover. Apart from that for all intents and purposes it's Twitter, the fact that it's centralized do not matter to usability

It seems its decentralised nature is a hindrance to some or many potential users[1]. My impression is that it's often treated as an alternative, but not really a truly viable alternative, and the field is wide open for something better.

1. For example https://twitter.com/hwkanderson/status/1588523823426859008

> a ton of traction

According to this, m.s has ~130k users which is tiny for a 6yo platform. And despite the renewed interest, some of that usage is people logging back into (but not really using) old accounts.

https://mashable.com/article/mastodon-twitter-alternative-el...

Platform demand is sticky rather than highly elastic because there are significant switching costs, some technical but most around rebuilding relationship trees. This is the biggest headache faced by communities who are subjected to deplatforming unless they have well-established lifeboat drills (a face of life on smaller chans and forums in the days when DDOS attacks were easier and accepted as a form of inter-community rivalry).

I don't see a mass exodus from Twitter any time soon, because the telegraphic nature of tweets and very strong network effects make it the idea outlet for people who like to complain.

Yeah, the network effect is strong, but there's never been a better time to challenge it. I think the potential of success is partly based on quality of the alternative, but also on the direction Twitter goes from here. It doesn't seem like the worst bet to make.

I would certainly like to see a replacement and Mastodon is deserving in many ways - pretty mature, built with sincere motives of delivering a better communication platform/protocol, decent UX and maintainers that listen. To the extent I express pessimism about it, it's because of patterns of social behavior rather than any shortcoming of Mastodon itself. Overcoming network effects needs some kind of can't-live-without-it innovation and sadly 5 years of trying demonstrate that federation alone ain't it.

It desperately needs a plug-n-play option that even granny can use. It should Just Work. A lot of twitter users are stumbling. The service that removes that tripping hazard will dominate. Might as well be mastodon.

Donald Trump, I heard, is working on one

socialtrue was up last year ?

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