Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

(posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is what Elon means by free speech)

well, for one, because you're wrong. I mean, it's not like a hard topic to research, a walk in any supermarket should be plenty evidence, even before reaching the cereals section.

if you want something more aking technological, you can stop by the mobile phone shelf.

and if you insist with software, the choice is so ample whole sites exists just to help people navigate https://alternativeto.net/software/3ds-max/?license=commerci...

I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost — sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them."

Twitter has never been quite like that. If the founder's vision succeeds, I might like Post very well indeed. In all such things, the proof is in the user experience as experienced by each user, but I think the goals sound good for Post.

How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.

Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.

I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.

Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).

It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.

Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed.

Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.

You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.

Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.

The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.

Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.

I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.

The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.

Yes --- except for a few nagging little problems. Like stability. Which is directly related to costs/fees to keep a "community" running.

Saying this on HN is irony crystalized.

The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok.

Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters in the people I followed, but the overall breadth was large.

In theory something like the fediverse provides this as well, but I'm not sold.

Exactly. Landlords should not exist.

Come on, you are getting A LOT from all those platforms. You feed someone else's enterprise just as much as it feeds you. Those who have even small audiences get a lot of value, not sure why you are trying to picture it as one way street.

That would be the fediverse (Mastodon).

Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing.

Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user.

> To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.

And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next.

And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.

It's a pity that we never hear from Advertisers

Paying to be viewed and heard (ads) is not cost effective for most artists.. It's almost always a scam, and it makes life as a musician even more impossible than it was prior to the Internet. You're better off now buying a billboard by the highway instead of trying to share free music on social media.

I think it's insane how limitedly people view the Internet, and how often it's only viewed only from one personal perspective at a time... Designers think from their personal perspective and that's it, there is only one success path and post format imposed on millions of people with these platforms.

This is Elon's problem right now too. He is trying to work out issues that suit his perspective, to the disappointment and dismay of many who those decisions will stump.

What the Internet needs is a community that separates big industry from independent creators (and that also does not charge people who are not making a profit to function), and also separates advertising from organic content They'd also need to police that heavily, just as much as illicit and negative content... That's the only social solution that will work moving forward. All these social platforms, like the metaverse seem to think that they can just build yet another shopping mall full of ads and then people will want to hang out there, and that won't work. Sites like facebook and Twitter were originally successful because they were free and equal for visibility, but as they try to tweak that, the same sites fall apart and fail. People are growing wise to the sites that begin the free to paid shopping mall conversion model.

People now want social sites and apps that help them to make money in simple and direct ways, and apps that free them from needing desk jobs, not sites that want to trap them into watching ads and spending money on big business products and services and scams like Crypto and NFTs. The app makers that don't get that will languish with weak user bases, and they will burn a lot of money in the process.

The absolute majority of the people on the planet have neither the time and technical knowledge, nor the desire to maintain their own platforms or stacks.

Decentralized communities suffer from all the problems of user-friendliness and ease of maintenance that Open Source generally suffers from.

I used to gleefully ridicule all things Twitter. But I've come to see it as more of a public benefit than a public menace. The automated censoring aggravates me because it does get things wrong, even after requesting review. So a tweak was in order, but this is not that kind of tweak, it's worse. I think we need something like it. I'm not sure if one is enough or if two is too many.

So just group chats.

I've seen a lot of people talking about the need for a nationalized version of something like twitter as a result of seeing how much damage one person with money can do. That would make it more like a community garden where people are doing it on their own land, but communally owned and in the same location as other people to take advantage of all the benefits that make it successful in the first place. Small decentralized communities are nice, but never really went away and fulfill a different need - there's plenty of small forums or discord channels for programming questions, but I still prefer to use stackoverflow when it's an option.

Over what timeframe? If only recently, are people joining just to rip the piss, and play with the muskovites?

There are others who want to avoid his product because they don't approve of his behavior.

If it weren't true, why would there be a hundred articles a day about it, and a US President announcing in a press conference that Musk's connections to foreign governments should be investigated?

Certainly plausible that twitter could survive without significant downtime, but it seems unlikely at this point: it appears Elon has been taking big reckless actions and he'll need to rapidly pivot to smart measured actions to keep infrastructure from tipping over.

Musk has no incentive to be truthful here anyway. He's in the middle of what could end up being one of the most embarrassing failures the last 50 years. Destroying a 44 billion dollar business in 3 weeks through sheer, unadulterated hubris and incompetence. There's nothing people love more than watching people fall from grace so I have a feeling that folks will remember this.

That is demonstrably false. If you spend some time there, you will notice a lot of nontechnical people using it.

Extreme free speech? Racism? Maybe. Racial hatred? No, I'm a bit uncomfortable now. Someone questioning the mainstream? Seems harmless; because lizards are taking over the world! No, you are mad but the person who thinks that Soros is taking over the world is welcoime because that sounds less mad.

Good luck.

He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that make nobody happy, but keep trouble at a minimum.

Musk is obviously incapable of doing this. He just started, and immediately spooked the advertisers. Then he started whining, and threatening both advertisers and his own employees, apparently not realizing that he has no real power over either.

It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. At this rate I expect him to be hit with fat fines from the EU, demands from various other countries to comply with their rules, piss off advertisers, run into trouble with illegal content of various kinds, and have stability issues and security exploits.

It's not that it offends me so much to have a conservative driven platform. It's that the man is clearly incompetent and flailing, and as amusing as that is to watch, it's clear the platform won't survive it so alternatives are needed.

Who says this platform wouldn't be reliant on advertising? You need to provide free access to build your social graph, and then you need advertising to monetize it. Paid subscription is more of a supplement at best (think YouTube/YouTube Premium).