Hacker News Reader

Comment by numpad0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting whale.

That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content problem by just gathering data in background and feeding it to the user anyway. That particular implementation might not work but it sounds correct.

IMO, not much of value of Twitter for most users is in ability to post tweets, it's in data bandwidth. 99.9% of users don't post anything interesting, those might as well be local text file or oit of band shared filler content. The value is in content sourcing, so something like multi-social RSS reader with optional P2P should be the way to go. Just IMdimO, though...

View on HN

While I use microblogging to frame the initial narrative, as explained in the article, this isn’t limited to Twitter-like products. Tangled is “GitHub on atproto”, Leaflet is “Medium on atproto”, and so on.

The problem with client-side P2P is you can’t do large-scale aggregation with consistency. Large-scale aggregation with consistency is what normal people expect from social apps.

Re: the OpenAI thing you mentioned, that's actually a perfect example of something atproto excels at. Since the data already exists in the network, you can crawl/index it and run your own tooling that does something proactive on cron jobs etc. See https://github.com/graze-social/iftta for some initial work in that area.

I like that labeler that shows which lexicons a user has in their repo.

https://bsky.app/profile/recordcollector.edavis.dev

Social networks rarely come up by being "the same but..."

They come up by doing something unique that can't be done on older platforms.

"Unique" is definitely not necessary. Look at the dominant social media platforms of the last two decades. MySpace -> Facebook -> Twitter -> Instagram -> Snapchat -> TikTok. Each of them was a minor evolution over the last, with the core feature set remaining basically the same. Lots of user-generated content, algorithmic recommendations, likes, comments, DMs, ads. There has really not been a revolution in the social media space since it was invented.

I see the features that launched them as substantially distinct.

The mode of interaction between users was wildly different from one to the other.

You may be considering their convergent evolution not what caused their rise in the first place.

I love your idea of a multi-social RSS reader with P2P underpinnings

...and this is why Nostr is different! You can build basically anything on it. A blog, a Twitter like application, a streaming service, messaging apps, the sky is the limit!

Here's a selection of things built on the protocol: https://nostrapps.com

Nostr is not different from atproto in that sense because atproto also supports arbitrary applications (the article uses Leaflet and Tangled as examples). There's a good comparison of atproto vs Nostr: https://shreyanjain.net/2024/07/05/nostr-and-atproto.html

Fair enough. But it is a more complicated protocol that, I feel, makes it a lot harder to diversify and build different applications on.

I really like the approach of nostr, but when I tried to use it, each client I tried would start me off following ecoin pump and dump influencers. It was really off putting.

I would’ve preferred starting off in an empty room, an experience more like using signal.

I've heard this multiple times but I don't know what clients do that? Most allow you to click something akin to the Following tab, just like Twitter, BlueSky, or what not.

Are you asking for an application that does not have other kinds of feeds?

Unfortunately Bitcoin has strong ties with the planet-burning-coin community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com