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What is a good alternative to twitter? (Preferably open source and being used?)

App.net[1] is probably the most popular alternative, although not open source. I believe StatusNet[2] is the most popular opensource alternative, although I don't know of any large networks based on it at the moment.

[1] https://join.app.net/ [2] http://status.net/

These are not alternatives to twitter, anyone with basic comprehension of how to run a rails scaffold could build a twitter clone. A real alternative to twitter would be something with a similarly huge community to get your voice heard and followed. This leaves alternatives to facebook that now allows following or according to stats but still far behind facebook: google+.

I disagree that anyone could build a Twitter clone. (At least something that could possibly handle anything near the scale of Twitter.) Aside from that, App.net has a reasonably large community.

This is so tangential, that I'm going to "risk" getting a few down votes to just put it out there.

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