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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

People are out of ideas. Twitter but for India. Twitter but not owned Elon Musk. Twitter but integrated with substack. Twitter but federated. Twitter but decentralized. Will any of these do better? Possibly the last two, if someone builts an innovative user experience on top of them.

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They've been trying the latter for years. Consumers don't really care too much.

Variations on the same basic idea compete all the time, it doesn't mean people are out of ideas; it's literally the opposite.

And Twitter is just RSS with a textbox.

Here's a fun fact about federated Twitter by the way: ActivityPub is just a JSON-ified reinvention of SMTP.

Where email only has inboxes and messages, ActivityPub also has HTTP-esque verbs. (Email can do everything ActivityPub can, in principle, but it has to send emails to do so. When an ActivityPub verb isn't understood, it's ignored, whereas when an email message isn't understood, it's presented to the user.)

Many twitter clones are almost pixel perfect. Twitter started with SMS support, and added many other unique things like @ mentions, threads that worked on mobile and the way you would see conversations between people if you followed both of them.

What’s the twitter that’s not owned by musk? Because I’m surprised there isn’t a single twitter clone alternative.

Truth social. It's not Musk but you know who else it is.

BlueSky? Threads by Mark Zuckerberg?

They’re not true clones. Bluesky is decentralized something and threads is hidden away in instagram.

What? Bluesky is Twitter with decentralization, yes, but so what? And Threads us a full, separate app, not just a page in Instagram (if that's what you mean)

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