Google killed its golden egg.<p>Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:<p>1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example.
2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.<p>(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).<p>Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).<p>But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.<p>Now their running around as a chicken without a head.
1. Nobody except your echo chamber cares about using a distributed or user controlled system. In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system.<p>2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project
<a href="https://github.com/getstream/winds" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/getstream/winds</a>
But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent)<p>3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.
"Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account."<p>I don't think I can take an idea seriously when it comes from someone who says stuff like this. Anyone who's had to manage a product will know better. It's like saying email and twitter are the same. But seriously, this post seems pretty out of touch with the reality.<p>He uses politics as an example, but for majority of the people politics is exactly why they leave Twitter because it's so annoying having to listen to these people. It's like listening to your grandfather talking about the same thing over and over again--most of his words are right, but after a while it gets old and you want to get away from having to listen to same shit over and over. Twitter is worse because it's not even some wisdom. Most tweets are low quality and increasingly many tweets have negative energy.<p>Lastly, we don't have to worry about Twitter's future. This guy worries that Twitter may go away, but I'm sure he wouldn't really care if it actually did. Instead, some other service will come along and swoop up anyone who want to keep using the format (Although it would be much smaller number since people now know better)
So you need to pre-approve posts? It seems like this would only increase the "echo chamber" factor for the audience, since they'll only see whatever opinions the author chooses to present in the comments section. I also don't see how this reduces abusive posts or work for the author. The author still has to read each post to review it, meaning they'll still see the abusive posts even if they don't approve them. And the most viewed authors will receive far too many responses to sift through. If you get 2000 comments, then chances are you won't view them all.<p>So when the problem right now seems to be that people aren't being exposed to diverse viewpoints, I don't think something like this would necessarily help.<p>I also don't necessarily think that giving Twitter our public history is bad. I suppose you need an alternative if you want the things you type to be forgettable, but I'm not sure that represents very many Twitter users. If you are using Twitter, surely you intend to let people know how you stand now and how you stood in the past? There isn't really a pretense of privacy with Twitter, and I don't think there ever has been. It serves a completely different purpose from something like Facebook, where there is a greater expectation that access to your data will be limited.<p>The idea of a blog-based social media network already exists; it's called Tumblr. I think Tumblr is much closer to meeting the needs of the Author, so maybe that is a better model to start from. Users have more control of their content there, from length of messages and mixing content to basic formatting.
This is what the folks at <a href="https://tent.io" rel="nofollow">https://tent.io</a> were trying to do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email).<p>The problem is that it's hard to compete with momentum. People use Twitter because it's where all their friends, followers, and interesting people to follow are.<p>If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.
I have a very simple dream, although I haven't taken the time to code it up.<p>I want a website with my name on it, owned by me, that auto-generates an index of all public content I put on the net -- FB posts, Tweets, HN posts and comments -- all of it. If I upvote a story on HN, it's listed on the site. If I explain something on Quora, it goes on my site too. It should be easy to download/backup. If I delete/modify something on my site, it gets deleted and modified on the other platform.<p>In this fashion, online content providers can make a buck off of me if they like -- but the stuff I create is primarily owned and managed by me. Which is the way it should be.
Shout out to mastodon.social [that's the address]- a Twitter alternative running on GNU social.<p>I'm not part of the Dev team, but I do donate to the patreon because I'd love it to succeed.
I'm working on a project with this purpose:<p><a href="http://hackertribe.io" rel="nofollow">http://hackertribe.io</a><p>(It's still work in progress, launching soon)<p>Here's my vision for the ultimate platform:<p>- Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit.<p>- Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter.<p>- Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page.<p>- Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags, publications.<p>- This platform is open source and decentralized. Anyone can easily export their data and spin up their own instance, which will be automatically plugged into the network(that functions like GNU Social).<p>- It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API.<p>- The community instance that I'm going to launch will have strict moderation, like Hacker News, that will optimize for the quality of the discussion. But anyone can launch their own instance, and that will enable the absolute freedom of speech.<p>- I am going to monetize it by offering easy and effortless hosting, the way Discourse does. That will take care of the development and server costs, while keeping the platform ad-free.<p>I think this sort of system would be perfect, and the only thing required to build it was the right decentralization protocol, which has appeared recently - ActivityPub.<p>At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out.<p>If you are interested in testing out this platform and would like to give me some feedback and shape it's development - send me a message(raymestalez@gmail.com), and I will invite you to the beta version.<p>If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code over here:<p><a href="https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus</a><p>(I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).
A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (<a href="https://deaddrops.com/" rel="nofollow">https://deaddrops.com/</a>).<p>"Why?", you may ask. Because around the world transparency and accountability is under attack. The many dangers of anarchic information (there are many) are mitigated by the many dangers of repression and influence operations globally.<p>The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.
The difficult to decentralize parts:<p>- hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc.<p>- <i>receiving</i> messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull.<p>Then there are social problems.<p>I don't know how far diaspora and OStatus/GNU Social have come. I think diaspora is more concentrated on building a software platform than on protocols (which if so I think is the wrong approach).<p>OStatus, i.e. thinking of communication protocols, is the right way to go. However it's very very difficult to agree not only on a common protocol, but also on data formats (what's a tweet, what is an album, etc.)
Over the last few years there have been many open projects trying to displace the big names in social media, but none of them seem to have even taken baby steps into fulfilling their goals in becoming a widespread open standard. On the other hand siloed services, such as Slack, pop up out of nowhere and take the tech world by storm.<p>What is the solution here, because it just seems to be getting worse? I don't want all my data to be controlled by a single company, on the other hand I don't want to like like a hermit in a cave.
One problem with distributed systems is the lack of a centralized authority for usernames. (Who says @POTUS is POTUS?) So why not create a custom TLD for a Twitter-like service? Each domain would be required to implement the API for that service. This would solve the username problem, and allow the registar to remove abusive users, but also let users host their own content. The only problem is domain registration fees, but hey, .tk domain names are still free.
> Blogs and RSS, the latter a system for subscribing to a collection of blogs, and being able to read their posts in a single chronological stream, almost exactly like Twitter, have been around forever.<p>> ...Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account. Readers can subscribe to your blog using any number of apps, for example the WordPress.com Reader or any other so-called aggregator, such as Inoreader or Feedly. Your list of subscriptions can be freely exported from one aggregator and imported into another.<p>"almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"...<p>So the alternative is to sign up to a blog service, write posts that have content similar to tweets, sign up to a separate RSS service, subscribe to RSS feeds and hope other people you want to follow do the same?<p>Some coders really underestimate how much even a tiny bit of friction can stop ideas from going viral especially when there's an integrated and easy to use alternative. Regular people don't want to cobble together their own brittle solution.
Honestly, I'm really tired of all these 'Let's replace Twitter', 'Twitter is dead' etc. stuff.<p>Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not care.<p>Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people use it. That is enough.
The main thing this guy seems to want to do is curtail abuse, or in other words he wants to restrict the ability for people to say things to you that you don't want to hear. Given that, I'm surprised he's advocating a distributed system where this would probably be an even harder problem to solve.<p>But frankly I don't understand why "Twitter abuse" is seen as such a big problem. In general if you wish to publish something and provide a channel for people to respond, it's practically impossible for anyone to guarantee you'll be happy with all the responses you get. This is one of the hard parts of being a publisher, which is what you become when you sign up to Twitter. It's sad if someone is hurt by the responses they receive, but it's not really Twitter's problem. Twitter does provide ways to shield yourself from hostile and abusive users but the expectations being placed on them seem unreasonable to me.<p>It's interesting that this exact same conversation is going on about Reddit (how people are offending each other, and we need to "fix" this). It's as if no one grasps that this has been going on since the beginning of time and if there's more of it at the moment that might point to <i>a deeper problem in society which needs to be resolved through dialogue.</i>
I think a better step for twitter would to be decentralize the admin powers to its users with better blocking options (blocking on chosen words, regex for racist memes?), but in this case there will be the possibility that you're just building more echo chambers. One could only wish that one day an AI would be able to analyze a long incoherent rant and distill it to some debatable arguments.
Even if you build a superior p2p platform you won’t make Elon Musk and Katy Perry sign-up.<p>My guess is you have to copy iMessage approach. Partner with awesome Twitter clients like Tweetbot which are also not happy with the way Twitter going. Authorize with Twitter account, integrate original Twitter feed, replies and conversations, add the killer feature and make authentic tweets feel like “green bubbles”.
I am not too concerned about Twitter keeping content b/c in the wall/river model of showing posts the past is irrelevant, even to the point that if a user wants to save a post for future reference/accountability a screenshot is far more effective than say scrolling down forever and find it (if it wasn't deleted). In other words: Twitter is more like a news channel not a blog.<p>Wanna fix Twitter? Fix trolls. It is far too obvious for the <i>real</i> users to spot when trolls are pushing a trend or flamming. Why can't Twitter setup some AI to mitigate troll activity? Same thing with big bucks pushing dubious campaigns a la Trump.<p>Two features that will make it better user experience: bookmark a tweet and add subjects/tags to tweets or accounts so users can have multiple streams well classified by subjects. Having a shampoo of content in chrono order forces scroll down to the point where one left last time.<p>However, all these fixes would make Twitter less profitable. So, nevermind.
Would love you gentel opinion on a related experiment we have with crowd moderated forums. If each group member rate just one new post, the group as a whole can collectively filter through thousands of ideas. See more informaion here <a href="http://blog.postwaves.com/about" rel="nofollow">http://blog.postwaves.com/about</a>
In the first 3-4 years of Twitter, the internet was full of blog post about "writing a twitter killer". Please give it a rest.<p>The only way to replace twitter is with a big push in protocols, and with open source software based on those protocols: easy one click install apps on the cloud or self-hosted.<p>Imagine if tweets were RFC'd like emails were, or NTP and then clients were built around it. It could work like IRC where you still have servers which only purpose is to link the nodes. You'd have internet splits like in the good old days (unless you cache everything everywhere, but then there are privacy concerns on delete tweets) but such a system would be open, and you'd retain your data and your feed's.
Now I'm imagining all the viral tweets I've seen lately containing fake news, and how much help pre-approval would be in stopping the inconvenient replies containing Snopes links. More control is a tool that cuts both ways.
Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora?<p>I think what blogs were missing where the social network. They had the blogroll, but it wasn't enough. Tumblr almost got it right, but somewhere along the way they seem to have messed up.
Interesting in this context: In 2013, David Gelernter proposed a future stream based web ("The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream"): <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-and-search-as-we-know-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-a...</a>
<i>In the coming weeks, I will be running a little experiment by trying to post even my short, previously twitter-only blurbs to this blog. I will have to cross-tweet these, but at least the primary source will be right here in my own database.</i><p>So basically the blogger plans to start adding tweet-length blog posts, and otherwise will continue using both Wordpress and Twitter as they're intended to be used.
The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels.<p>Blogs may be better if you're e.g. a politician, philosopher or anyone who wants to distribute long-form content - but they're unusable if you like to engage in personal conversation.<p>I surely would not have found my last girlfriends without Twitter, just saying... it has unique advantages over FB, blogs, mail, Tinder and anything else out there.
I think a better twitter would literally be twitter but instead of a feed, it would be a dashboard of all your follower's most recent tweet.<p>Then if you get bored you can click on a username to view a complete (chronological) feed.
Twitter would be useful if they gave me the firehose in my feed. Having to follow someone is so caveman era stupid. I would even pay for the firehose then let my friends spam me with their 'ads'.
The problem isn't technical. (Any three readers of HN could bang together something "much better" than Twitter in N weeks!)<p>The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.
I'm a huge fan of blogs, agree with the author in general, but think he's defining "something much better" in a way that doesn't make sense to the average person.<p>Twitter is at least easy enough for the average person or even dopey + clueless non-technical celebrity to add to their phone, search, and use normally.<p>Blogs give infinitely more customization options, and in theory are easy to setup, but in practice are still a lot more work and harder to setup. All of their advantages are for nothing when it takes a lot more work to setup compared to a Twitter account for the average person.<p>Regardless, Twitter is done for. They're trying in vain to achieve an impossible politically correct goal (all of their new safe spaces features to eliminate trolling and name calling) rather than actually innovating or coming up with a business model that can sustain them.
Not to mention the fact that Twitter will censor views that it does not agree with. Don't support companies that engage in censorship.<p>There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: <a href="https://gab.ai" rel="nofollow">https://gab.ai</a><p>It doesn't solve the problem of giving your data to a company, but it's a hell of a lot more open and inclusive than any other platform.