Ask HN: Do you see any of the 'alternative social media' going mainstream? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you see any of the 'alternative social media' going mainstream?

10 pointsrblion8 comments

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all losing mindshare. TikTok is a Trojan horse. The others are big in tech circles and the reddit-savvy crowd, barely registering in most people's lives.

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About the same as I'd count on "alternative medicine" becoming mainstream, aka 0% chance outside of fringe groups. There's a reason why those alternative social media platforms are considered "alternative".

If you want your social media project to be successful you need to address what's wrong with the existing ones while not introducing new problems. All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems.

> All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems.

This seems like you simply disagree with certain platforms about what the relevant problems are. Most of the people moving from Twitter to Mastodon, etc, simply want to maintain their networks in what they perceive to be a stable environment (which Twitter no longer is.) And Mastodon in particular, being federated, solves the problem of ownership over data and decentralized moderation, which many people (particularly in marginalized groups) care about.

And of course there are other alternatives that go in the opposite direction, eschewing identity and moderation altogether.

What problems do you think they should be focusing on, that they aren't?

Outside of “tech Twitter”, it’s just as stable as ever. Most people who use it to socialise weren’t impacted at all by the recent changes. I can guarantee you that even with the worst possible management it’ll still be orders of magnitude more stable than Mastodon or whatever FOSS solution comes along.

The problem with traditional, mainstream social media for normal people is ads, dark patterns, spam and the general adversarial environment where the platform is primarily there to serve the advertiser and not the user, thus the latter are treated like cattle. Those are the problems that an alternative solution needs to solve, while ideally not introducing its own.

Mastodon, by virtue of not having a business model (which would also be a massive problem should it gain large amounts of users and they stick around), avoids the ads and dark patterns, but introduces many problems of its own.

I’ve written my thoughts on Mastodon previously and they are just as valid nowadays: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you’re building a competitor to mainstream social media and call it Mastodon and the posts “toots” and refuse to see/acknowledge it even 6 years later, it’s dead on arrival and I’m not even talking about addressing the hard problems brought upon by decentralisation if you couldn’t even address that first.

I think the alternative social media is already there, but it will come with new faces like TikTok. It just delivers more dopamine per second than the model of Twitter and Mastodon. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and co will stay, but I believe they will never experience as much growth again. I think Facebook actually saw that coming and therefore it expanded a lot in growing markets and provided infrastructure. This could actually work long term for them.

I see substack gaining ground as a highbrow twitter replacement for literary, academic and journalist types of people. Possibly for tech people as well but they tend to make their own circles. It won't take off as much among the general populace because of the 'read? ew' reaction that is unfortunately too common nowadays.

They need to put in some kind of proper microblogging service though rather than just the chat feature.

decentralized social media is an oxymoron. We had it, before facebook we had forums and blogs and irc and other disconnected identities (and it was great). We led multiple parallel lives. The purpose of social media was to tie everything in a single identity , which naturally lends to centralized behemoths.

How about we let the social media paradigm die ?

BeReal has already gone mainstream imo.

I’ve heard of it, it doesn’t check all the boxes for me personally.

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