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Comment by massimosgrelli | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible how this type of revival from the past gained such meaningful traction, but, in a way, I fully understand it. The online world has become so confusing that many desire a simple one. The same feeling drove me to adopt Threads over Twitter/X—even if I still use them both.

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The problem is that all mainstream social media has degenerated into entertainment. Staying up to date about the lives of people you know irl is seemingly no longer their intended purpose.

But people's need to connect in this way — just updates from those who they chose to follow, displayed chronologically, and no other content whatsoever — has not gone anywhere. That's why I'm also working on my own project that implements this type of social network with ActivityPub support: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

It's beta quality for now and I'm not promoting it much yet, but I hope to bring it to 1.0 by the end of this year.

You should add some screenshots or video to the Readme, I'm too lazy to build it just to experience it.

Yes I should. A proper website that explains what it is and contains docs about the client API (that also doesn't exist yet) is something I plan to have for 1.0.

In the meantime, here it is live on my server: https://friends.grishka.me/

The so called enshittification of the internet.

It's happened time and time again already. Firefox was the light version of Mozilla. Then that got bloated. Chrome was the light version of Firefox. Now that's bloated. Very few things resist bloat over time. This website is an example. People sometimes ask for new features, but the only change I can think of is pagination for long comment threads, which was driven by necessity.

Can't wait for IRC to become popular again. I'll still be there, waiting.

The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what advertisers want vs what users want

The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what the loudest dumbest users want vs all else.

> The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what the loudest dumbest users want vs all else.

I'm not on X, so I don't know, but IME on every other place on the internet since forever is that the loudest, dumbest users ARE the advertisers.

An environment that monetarily rewards users pushing their message into other peoples faces performs an environmental selection to make the advertisers the loudest and dumbest users.

Shilling scams, cosplaying as an influencer or being a bot does not make users an advertiser.

> The confusion, especially on X, is caused by focusing on what advertisers want vs what users want

Is it? Last time I heard about it advertisers were going away because Musk is focusing on what loudest users want (being able to speak loudly) and not what advertisers want (moderation)

I feel like this is a relatively new situation, whereas the parent post describes very well the development of the service over the last decade.

No, Twitter was never especially advertiser focused, although it did do a bit of "brand" stuff. The destruction of Twitter was because as a a "free speech platform" it naturally picked up the most aggressive, nastiest, confrontational politics. It then algorithmically shoved this in front of the people most likely to make retaliatory posts. It is dying because it now focuses on what the owner wants, which is a set of increasingly fringe right wing lunatics and some guy called "catturd2".

Hence getting banned in Brazil. I guarantee that is not an outcome any advertiser wanted.

I still use X and it's still very good. It's tough rn (as it always was) 6 months before the big US election but it'll go back to normal. I've been on twitter since 2011 and it's been the same pattern all these years.

The secret, always is - follow new people in small increments and generously unfollow at the slightest annoyance. There are still lots of interesting people to find!

You'll discover there's people on both sides of political issues who can make their points and not be annoying about it but these are maybe 1-3% of political people. You can also completely ignore politics by being judicious with your unfollows.

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