where's X/Twitter competition? | Hacker News Reader

where's X/Twitter competition?

5 pointsoxqbldpxo20 comments

With so many smart developers and investors, after so long, why isn't there a straightforward competitor to twitter?

Because it doesn't solve a problem? That isn't just snark, but a real aspect of competing with an existing product. To compete, you need to be able to solve the same problem in a better way. Twitter didn't really grow from being a solution to anything - it grew from being unique at the dawn of social media. So it is kind of its own thing.

> Because it doesn't solve a problem?

But that's just social media in general. Doesn't mean it can't be valuable.

> Twitter didn't really grow from being a solution to anything - it grew from being unique at the dawn of social media. So it is kind of its own thing.

This doesn't mean that something better can't be made. Lots of people clearly don't want to support X anymore, whether for political reasons or for UX reasons. I don't see why "a better Twitter" is somehow not possible because it wouldn't "solve a problem". Why can't the "problem" be that X sucks ass but there isn't a good alternative?

The question you are missing is why an alternative is needed in the first place? Fine, X sucks. Many of us can agree on that. But what problem is it solving that would force a a replacement to be created if it simply did not exist?

I'm not saying it has no value, nor denying that people find uses for it. I'm saying that without an external problem being solved, building a competitor doesn't answer the original question of... why does this need to exist at all?

I assure you social media existed well before Twitter. Twitter's original niche was called "microblogging", which was novel at the time. It did solve a problem of a lot of fractured discussion and how certain types of discussion would take place and be visible.

It also had the feature that celebrities might respond to you. It was a way to get news directly from journalists. It had its network effect and took off.

> why isn't there a straightforward competitor to twitter?

Network effects are very difficult to build and retain and take years to grow if you are starting from scratch and 95% of these competitors found this out the hard way. (Post.news, T2, Spill, Hive all failed)

Threads remains the most serious and viable alternative to X (They didn't start from scratch and used Instagram's network to onboard hundreds of millions).

Bluesky was seen as a similar alternative bringing back the old Twitter feel and millions of Brazilians chose Bluesky over the others. [0].

Other than those two, the rest are just too small to be taken seriously and have shutdown or have not grown in daily active users and have around <1M users using it daily.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/04/social-media-platform-bluesk...

The Blue sky user count grew by like 50% when Twitter banned Brazil.

From a feature and activity level perspective, it's pretty close to being an alternative (I even see people talking about the engagement being quite a bit better), so as you say, network effects.

Competitor as in what? What value add would a competitor have? What qualifies as a twitter competitor? There can be no straightforward competitor because it's not straightforward.

Allowing opinions that were at one time censored, that's Gab. Allowing one particular individual that was banned on twitter that a lot of people want to know what he is saying, that's Truth Social. Of course those aren't really considerations anymore...

Does it have to be a company that runs the server and builds the experience and the client? I doubt you'll find a decent one. There are, however, protocols, and if you think about it, twitter works better as a protocol than as an app.

Independent communities that can block each other? Instead of one CEO, would you like to be at the mercy of many? Mastodon is what you want.

Are you interested in a censorship resistant protocol where you don't really have anyone who can tell you what to do? Nostr.

Do we want to mention bluesky?

I'm personally partial to nostr, to me it's the only thing that isn't worse than twitter in some deal breaking way.

T2 did a long post-mortem on their company (ultimately failed) https://medium.com/gabor/from-t2-to-pebble-the-rise-challeng...

Seems that this is mostly hard because of the classical network effect and resulting monopoly.

The hard thing is not distribution of short text messages on the web, or even UI for that matter, it's the acquired ubiquituous adoption in news coverage and public discussion.

Nothing is going to be a 1:1 replacement because that's boring, but the unique thing about Twitter was/is that it's a place where just about every person and organization of note has an account, from your favorite niche author to your local government to A-list celebs.

By that metric, Threads is now a serious competitor. I don't like it, but it's the alternative that a ton of people have chosen.

Maybe you need more than developers and investors. Maybe you need to convince a lot of people to start using it first for the network effect.

Mastodon works better than Twitter ever did, in my experience. I think you've set your standards up to be disappointed.

I was a user for many years. I grew frustrated to the point of disillusionment with the constant fighting between admins and prominent personalities, the attacks, the fracturing of the network... I just want to be able to talk to who I want to. Ran my own instance too, simply not blocking some guy or other is enough to get you blocked by others. The network architecture is flawed from the get go unfortunately, it's prone to this type of fracturing that makes it not really conducive to anything other than in tribe virtue signaling and echo chambers. You simply cannot get on a server and talk to anyone you want, it's not possible.

I've given up on it and moved to Nostr. A lot of fediverse people have been dipping their toes in as of late, but I took the dive, I see where the wind is blowing. The relief I felt when I no longer had to manage the appearance of my social interaction, there's a chilling effect there which is strangling mastodon and the fediverse as an actual social network and it cannot be fixed.

That's a fair complaint, but this is a problem inherent to every decentralized network I've tried. Every network worth it's salt has to have a way to deal with adversarial users posting spam, ads or illegal content. Some instances go further with their social signalling but I don't really care enough about those types to notice.

As someone that doesn't feel the need to have everyone in one feed, Mastodon is just my happy place. If Nostr users aren't consuming ActivityPub streams, they may never see my posts and I'm perfectly OK with that.

It's inherent to a network of federated servers each with their own admin, you can create a network topology where users aren't reliant on an admin and where they can freely communicate with each other regardless what anyone else says if they want, you just have to change the network topology.

Works better how? Mastodon is really frustrating for non-tech people to use. I personally have found it difficult to use, but to be fair, I haven't spent a lot of time with it.

Most instances run no ads, for one. I dislike advertisement so it's really nice, at least in my opinion. Most of the tech-oriented people I follow are there, the major publications have a pretty good presence, and there's pretty much zero inter-instance hostility. You can just follow people from anywhere and enjoy one nice aggregated timeline. Twitter's algo is a sloppy mess in comparison, at least to me.

The straightforwards competitor to Twitter is Threads. Just like Bing is a straightforwards competitor to Google.

I mean, Mastodon has over ten million users. That isn't Twitter scale but it isn't nothing. And 200 million people are using Threads. And Bluesky... also exists.

The competition is there. You have to get past the premise that a platform has to completely subsume Twitter in every metric to be a valid alternative. I feel like we're moving past the paradigm of the web centralizing around a few big silos anyway. A lot of people are moving to closed Discord communities for instance.

There is. Threads. Also Mastodon.

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