OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup.<p>I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.)<p>Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.)<p>The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will.<p>Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.
How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternative" narrative - twitter gets more user base and more likely is going to succeed in future iterations - while "alternatives" get stuck in the past.<p>How many failed startups tried to go against facebook, as "social networking alternative" as a rebellion to some bad facebook press, policies or scandals? How many of those succeeded? None.
We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon.<p>The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social
Sounds awful. I don't go on Twitter to "learn" from my betters (presumably, the founder includes himself in that category).<p>If you look at FTX, you have these supposed "journalists" quoting from "Autism Capital" on Twitter...that is where their sources are. I am guessing "Autism Capital" is some random guy, in his mom's bedroom, making no money from this...and there are journalists taking down $80k/year just ripping stories from that.<p>The question this should raise is: why do we need the journalists? These people are pointless, they don't have interesting opinions, they are just information tollgates, Twitter removes that friction totally (equally, I worked in finance, I started working just before the Twitter age and assumed that everyone else was very diligent/knowledgeable/doing lots of good research...and then all these people hopped onto Twitter, start outputting more information, and you realise they are just total idiots...which I also realised after working in the industry, Twitter exposes the man behind the curtain).<p>Give me the anonymous cesspit. If it makes you mad and upset, don't go on there, that is on you. The doctor can't be blamed for the needle being sharp.
More options are a good thing, but his Twitter alternative might be misidentifying Twitter's actual strongest point. Allow me to elaborate and tell me if you disagree, but this is how I feel:
I never used twitter because of the social aspects. At all. I'm not there because I want to have a chat.
I just use Twitter to get new artwork from artists I like or follow game devs who post their content there.
For me, Twitter's real value was always content sharing. The social aspect was tolerable at best and detrimental at worst, which is why I don't want to use an alternative explicitly focusing on the social aspect.
What I really want is a Twitter with content creation focus, instead of social. I think most alternatives are focusing on the social aspects, so I thought I should share this sentiment.
> "Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or sad?"<p>Nostalgia alert. Social media used to provide 100% value all the time? Trolls didn't exist 10 years ago? "Rational debates" were thriving with a 140 character limit? When Twitter became a resource for learning about research on Covid and coverage of protests worldwide - surely subjects that would be fair game on "Post"[0] - I was certainly getting a lot of utility, but I can't honestly say I never felt angry or sad. This all just feels incredibly naive, like we can just turn back the clock.<p>[0] Speaking of nostalgia, I long for a future where company/product names aren't just dictionary words anymore.
I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.
I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform.<p>To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.<p>At this point anyone who willingly joins a new VC funded social media monstrosity is just a masochist.<p>Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!
I'm really excited to see competition in this market. I wish Twitter the best, and I hope Elon succeeds with that. I also hope Noam succeeds. And maybe they will push each other to be better for users overall.<p>One fear I have is that platforms will divide along ideological lines and inhibit respectful disagreement and open conversation. We seem to be short enough on that already and I really don't want it to get worse. It's so important for us to acknowledge that the people "on the other side" are also smart, well educated, and want the best for people - just like we do.
“Protocols, not platforms” is the way to go, as Mike Masnick lays out.[1]<p>What we need is innovation & experimentation in terms of business models in the decentralised fediverse.<p>[1] <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech" rel="nofollow">https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...</a>
The waiting list is shortened if you invite 5 friends with a special link. Whomever posted this basically invited all of us.<p>I think twitter's "high" traffic right now is akin to a traffic jam on the motorway because people slow down to watch that horrible terrible accident...
> Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it.<p>Growing a garden on someone else's land means I don't need to worry about the upkeep. To continue your metaphor, leasing farm land is literally a thing people do. I genuinely do not believe the large majority of people want to worry about hosting, community management, etc etc. The people that do are in the extreme minority.<p>>To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user.<p>You are using Hacker News right now because there is an audience and community. That is the upside to the user.
This manifesto is generic enough that it aligns with all existing social-network platforms. So this Twitter alternative is bringing nothing new to the table.<p>Worse, there isn't even an attempt to provide or support an open protocol/open endpoint as a way to entice developers.<p>Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusion that had this open endpoint been provided, that it wouldn't be shut-down in a couple years once this "Post" service gains market share .. but still, this performative action would have been welcome.
NEVER AGAIN will I be a sharecropper on someone's land. I'm sick of all these oligarchs who promise the world to you and then they tell you what to think, how to behave and what you can say. Eventually they will take it away from you without an even a recourse.<p>Just join Mastodon. Start by using someone else's instance [1] and then learn how to run your own. It's not hard.<p>[1] <a href="https://instances.social/" rel="nofollow">https://instances.social/</a>
I'm very interested in seeing how Twitter dying shakes out in terms of social media. Frankly, I don't think people "get it" and that includes me. From where I sit no one wants to self-host, no one wants to be advertised to, but no one wants to pay for anything either. As always, one million "alternatives" will be made, they will die one by one in some Squid Game style battle royale and then society will choose one and the cycle continues.
Why? Why even get in this race, there is nothing to win. Win by not playing, and just give those millions of dollars that were about to commit to losing anyway to local schools, community centers, food banks, and hey maybe just buy housing for the homeless (oh no, so unfair! they got a house for free! All they had to do was be on the brink of death every single day!). Do something <i>good</i> with those dollars instead.
Fleeing one centralized platform into another is futile, and will end in the same problems.<p>I wrote more about this below, covering less centralized protocols like Mastodon, Farcaster, BlueSky, nostr, and others:<p><a href="https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1dFMIY3NjzImJ7PE" rel="nofollow">https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...</a>
I read it till waitlist... I get it but also... I don't want to wait, by the time they send me email, I will forget what it was.<p>I think there is a place for, not Twitter alternatives, but for newer ways how we can be social and connect and discover interesting people. And I do welcome those explorations and want to support it, but waitlist is not something I enjoy.
Haven't seen discussed yet, but for me the killer feature would be the ability they mention to be able to pay for individual "articles".
I.e. maybe a federated micropayment news feed where i don't have to subscribe to NYTimes AND WaPo, AND (many others), but only pay pennies for individual stories.
mastodon is surprisingly good, imo. I joined about a year ago. It worked fine, but it was basically dead for me. I didn't know who to follow and I couldn't find anything interesting to do. Everything changed in the last couple of weeks. It's busy now. People are posting and interacting. A large chunk of German twitter moved over to mastodon completely. And a good chunk of electronics twitter is also now on mastodon. My timeline is simply a chronological order of post of people that I follow, no suggested post, no advertisement, etc. It's very possible the whole twitter-is-dead talk will be over in a week. But mastodon has some real traction.
What if, someone just wakes a twitter clone, charges a small amount, keeps it simple, makes some profit and doesn't get greedy. Every decent tech thing over that last 10 years once it goes big and vc and markets are involved it goes to shit.
So is <a href="https://twitter.com/gabor" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/gabor</a><p><a href="https://t2.social/" rel="nofollow">https://t2.social/</a>
Twitter shouldn't be a service, it should be a protocol. Technically, when Twitter launched it didn't offer much you couldn't already do with email and listserv.
Billionaires gotta billionaire. Instead of promoting a healthy, sustainable platform, everyone just wants to lock people into their walled garden to extract money from them.
There was probably an opportunity a few weeks ago to create a social network only for the elites who could prove that they had a Twitter verified account (e.g. by putting a verification code in the bio / description). That would create crazy amounts of FOMO! But unfortunately now anyone can get one, so it's not as attractive. :)
Cool! That's what we need! <i>TWO</i> Twitters!! One wasn't useless enough. How about we take all that time and energy and build a few fission plants.
We need more alternatives to Twitter. Hopefully one of them will excel.<p>Mastodon isn't really a viable alternative for mainstream, despite what the techy crowd boasts.
> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other;<p>> Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them.<p>If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?
It seems deeply ironic that Noam is starting a Twitter competitor, when he's mostly well-known for some comments he made about lazy startup employees which seem like something Elon Musk might have said. But then you realize it's not ironic at all.
>Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?<p>No because it never was like this. Nice try, though. Have fun blowing your fortune on something that will never catch on.
Just amazing all these pearl-clutching progressives having their minds break because of nothing other than Elon buying it. Every single tech company of note, every major media outlet not named Fox, every university, all controlled by liberals and just <i>one</i> gets bought by someone who's not even really conservative just more like outwardly anti-woke and these people can't handle it and throw temper tantrums without even being able to articulate why. Hysterical.
Elon Musk is a clown and it would be very entertaining to watch him lose $44B as Twitter crashes and burns, like slipping on a banana peel.<p>...but, honestly, the idea of a large social network not reliant on advertising is interesting and I want to see it work out. I don't know much about this Noam Bardin person, but considering Waze is just another bottomless pit of data collection, my hopes aren't very high that this will be anything notable beyond having a unique page layout. I don't see a reason to use it over one of the many Mastodon instances.<p>Maybe Twitter's problems are due to the traditional business model, and shifting towards paid accounts might change that. Or, it might make them 10x worse. Idk, but it's certainly the most interesting thing happening in social media right now.
How many twitter articles does hacker news need a day?<p>I get it, you're social media junkies and your main supplier is now giving you tainted stuff. I'm sorry but that has almost nothing to do with technology and a lot to do with your own shortcomings.
"Remember when social media was fun, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and actually made you smarter?"<p>No lol, wtf is he talking about