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Comment by clcaev | Hacker News Reader

What is the core value proposition of twitter? It seems simple, short form informations delivery (eg “follow me on twitter”) is central. The “likes”, retweets, and follower counts are secondary but perhaps important metrics that drive engagement. A simple link plus QR for paper is needed. Moderation seems a challenge. Are there simpler alternatives to mastodon? is federation possible? Why is RSS not used for this?

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Inertia. It's extremely hard to build a network product and even moreso to dethrone the dominant player in the space

Bluesky strikes a balance between the federated Mastodon and the Twitter walled garden.

I'm not so sure about that. Bluesky by large migrated from twitter aiming to escape the likes of Elon's politics, but they still brought over some of the most toxic cancel/brigade culture that twitter had to offer.

Not suggesting all of bluesky is bad, but it sure ain't the most pleasant crowd in it's own right either.

Bluesky, like Mastodon, is built on an open network on open source code. Run your own data server and moderation services that cater to your needs. Many are already doing it: Northsky, Eurosky, Blacksky, etc. If you want to live in a safe space isolated from the mainnet and its allegedly toxic users, you can do that too: Roundabout is built on ATProto but run on its own network, also Truth Social and Threads are forked versions of Mastodon but federated with nobody (Threads used to have opt-in Mastodon federation before Facebook decided they no longer want users to be able to do that).

Mastodon isn't all that complicated. But, obviously it's not where people went when people fled Xitter, by and large. The funny people and journalists mostly went to Bluesky and the normal people mostly went to Threads because they already had an Instagram account. The Nazis and child pornographers and the people who were comfortable being around Nazis and child pornographers remained on Xitter. But, a few nerds went to the fediverse and we are generally having a nice time there.

RSS is not a read-write medium. You can't realistically carry on a semi-realtime conversation over RSS.

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