7 ms·

Let’s replace Twitter with something much better

227 points by cpbotha 10y ago

SquidLord 10y ago
It's adorable. I love it when people let their kids on the Internet.
murtnowski 10y ago
Why replace twitter? just do your own thing and let twitter do its thing
- welly 10y ago
  I suspect your own thing probably wouldn't have the same visibility as twitter and that's partly the appeal of something like twitter.
- olegkikin 10y ago
  Because of Twitter's censorship. There should be a free (as in speech) alternative.
nixos 10y ago
Google killed its golden egg. Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web: 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. (The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android). Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email). 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. Now their running around as a chicken without a head.
- elastic_church 10y ago
  > Now their running around as a chicken without a head. And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken No worries
  - nixos 10y ago
    >And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s
    - elastic_church 10y ago
      well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend. But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements
      - nihonde 10y ago
        The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.
        icebraining 10y ago
        "I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898. Yet it's still going, more than a century later.
        ethbro 10y ago
        Or in other words, "Nobody was ever fired for suggesting they buy from IBM." In the absence of alternatives, marketing money goes to advertising.
cyorir 10y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- mos_basik 10y ago
  Pre-emptive apology for longpost - not all of it is aimed at you! This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of "what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others) have been having recently. OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a centralized system belonging to one company: 1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes bankrupt. 2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) is exercising supreme veto power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note: opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.) Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress, not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll, Hexo, etc.) As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools. Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr. But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs. degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement. "But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous". I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass reported the artist's accounts and got them banned. Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans, to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work. If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold and are never heard from again. Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it seems like a problem. - - - - This is somewhat of an aside, but the design choices Tumblr has made that make it more than a simple blogging platform have strongly colored its community. I found a blogpost titled "The Toxoplasmosa of Rage"[0] a while back that mused at length about why and how people get so mad about the things they do, especially now that we have the Internet facilitating it. Tumblr was only one of many subjects he touched on, but it stuck with me the most. Put succinctly: on Tumblr, you don't comment on posts; you reblog them and add your own commentary. Both post and commentary are seen by the previous (re)blogger(s) and your followers, who often share your views. The result is that if material is only seen by people who like it, everyone is happy - but if (as frequently happens) someone sees something they don't like and are compelled to comment on it, Tumblr's system sets up a perfect storm of vitriol as material is alternately bounced between clusters of the network with opposing opinions. All of which now seems especially ironic to me, given the recent uptick of interest in more accurately identifying echo chambers in media (social and otherwise), and attempting to negate them somehow, possibly by adjusting feed algorithms to expose people to opposing ideas more often. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's worth noting that the traditional blog platform avoids this issue by keeping comments confined to the post they were made on. There are some systems that fuzzy the system so it isn't totally compartmentalized. Disqus is its own little network, for instance. I think Wordpress uses its own commenting ecosystem so people can click on the profile pic of your comment and find your blog, if you have one. Backlinking also increases connectivity by letting readers know who has responded to the piece they're reading, which I hardly consider a bad thing. Maybe the context shifts forced by systems like backlinking or comment linking dampen fly-off-the-handle emotional reactions that fuel flame wars like on Tumblr or Twitter. HN does something similar by hiding the reply link from the front page when a chain nests deep enough, forcing you to go to the comment's own page to reply. Just a little kick, asking "is replying really necessary?". [0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ (CTRL-F for "completely different" if you only want Section V that mentions Tumblr)
pmlnr 10y ago
> Let’s replace Twitter with something much better Federated XMPP?
mikebay 10y ago
I would like to replace twitter with something else who do not supress my opinions, hide my posts, delete my account, give my details and geo positions to NSA... oh too many reasons to skip twitter really. I really hate these censorship business companies. Freedom of speech in internet today seems to be decied by Facebook, Google and Twitter. All these corporations have long history of violating peoples privacy and hiding peoples opinions. Im very happy that people start to find / develop alternatives. Dear Twitter, your censorship and agenda is wrong and you should be shutted down!
mzw_mzw 10y ago
A burning dumpster full of medical waste would be better than Twitter, so fortunately the bar is low.
mikebay 10y ago
Since @Twitter is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll - @RealJamesWoods
tedunangst 10y ago
So, replace twitter with the thing that Twitter replaced?
- cpbotha 10y ago
  It is a cunning plan!
oniMaker 10y ago
Not to mention the fact that Twitter will censor views that it does not agree with. Don't support companies that engage in censorship. There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: https://gab.ai https://gab.ai 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.
- riffic 10y ago
  Is gab.ai an implementation of OStatus? https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
  - oniMaker 10y ago
    Not to my knowledge. The platform is very young though. You could propose this idea to the founder.
  - Torgo 10y ago
    No, it doesn't appear to implement any of OStatus.
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  Gab is predictably filled with Nazis, which isn't unrelated to that idiotic Pepe frog they use as a logo. Who would willingly go there?
  - oniMaker 10y ago
    People who believe in freedom of speech.
    - mikeyouse 10y ago
      If the difference between Twitter's speech limits and Gab's is that the latter allows Nazis and harassment, I think you'll find most prefer "less" free speech.
riffic 10y ago
OStatus/GNU social.
jaxondu 10y ago
Maybe a modern Usenet? Any idea what are the pain points of Usenet?
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
  Reddit is the modern Usenet. And it's about 1000x better, from my own personal experience.
- josh64 10y ago
  spam for one.
kovrik 10y ago
Honestly, I'm really tired of all these 'Let's replace Twitter', 'Twitter is dead' etc. stuff. Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not care. Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people use it. That is enough.
- wallacoloo 10y ago
  Yeah, just like Notepad "works" as a text editor. If there's room for improvement, why not improve?
  - kovrik 10y ago
    Agree: "Then improve", but not "Write another blog post about it"
    - igor47 10y ago
      That's just ludicrous. Promoting a new product is part of building that product.
- searchfaster 10y ago
  Agree.. twitter is far from dead. Looking at reddit data, Mention of twitter is skyrocketing (election driven). http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analytics&page=1&subreddit=&domain=&q=twitter http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy... Twitter rules in sports and politics.. http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analytics&page=1&subreddit=&domain=twitter.com&q= http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...
throwaway420 10y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
makomk 10y ago
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.
jstimpfle 10y ago
The difficult to decentralize parts: - hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc. - receiving messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull. Then there are social problems. 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). 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.)
- tschellenbach 10y ago
  At the end of the day users just don't care about decentralization. They do care about: * The network of users present on the app * Quality of the mobile and desktop clients * Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it hard to create a competitive product. Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch on for social networks though.
  - jstimpfle 10y ago
    I'm not sure if I want innovation in the underlying protocol. A protocol should be exactly that, underlying. What ideas do you have for innovation? The only problem with email that I can think of is the lack of end-to-end encryption. But that's a social, not technical problem.
  - confounded 10y ago
    Another thing that they care about way more than we recognize, is "the latest trend among tech nerds" Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years. The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies. Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better time for a new, open, social network.
rrggrr 10y ago
A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/ https://deaddrops.com/). "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. The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  Do you know of anyone who's combining one or more of these, in app form, for this purpose? I have made an "audio encoder" (https://github.com/quiet https://github.com/quiet) and I've given some thought to how you might make a mesh tweet network on top of it, but real world constraints are hard.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/ https://deaddrops.com/). Add APRS and regular ham radio. I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    I've heard some really interesting things about the LoRa packet radio protocol. Runs in ISM bands (433/868/915 MHz), low-power, excellent range (2 km urban, 20+ km LOS).
mschuster91 10y ago
The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels. 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. 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.
GirlsCanCode 10y ago
Translation: "My candidate lost, so I'm blaming the Internet."
thinkmassive 10y ago
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. 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.
mrwnmonm 10y ago
i used to read a lot of blogs before, i don't know why now i can't stand reading a long article
tschellenbach 10y ago
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. 2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project https://github.com/getstream/winds https://github.com/getstream/winds But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent) 3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.
- ryukafalz 10y ago
  >In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system. Why is this?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Harder to set up. With centralized systems, all you need is the URL and you can get the magic social-stuffy box on any device you have. (TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
    - posterboy 10y ago
      Also, the promise that it's safe because you can check the source is really lost when, you know, you can't actually check the source for lack of time, skill or trust in the chain of trust.
    - radarsat1 10y ago
      I've never understood why P2P always goes for the end users.. in most cases it doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention -- harder to set up, etc. (For some reason bittorrent became the exception that proves the rule.) However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic. I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that. Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.
mijustin 10y ago
This is what the folks at https://tent.io https://tent.io were trying to do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email). 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. If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Don't forget the free (?) advertising media gives them. Well media is who using it in the first place of course, but it's strange twitter is not able to leverage that to go more mainstream. It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.
toomuchstuff 10y ago
how does he manage to sound so insufferable over something so insignificant. this is prime hn content.
lucaspiller 10y ago
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. 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.
- bootload 10y ago
  "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." Follow Dave Winer and absorb the lessons he has/is solving ~ http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.html http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.h...
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Free, open source projects generally suck at good UX and gaining momentum, and I'm not sure either of those is a solvable problem. Well sometimes you can fix it if there's a major corporate backer willing to fund a bunch of full-time devs, but that's not really consistently reproducible.
- jlj 10y ago
  What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users, and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the company charter from day 1.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.
quinndupont 10y ago
It's never been attempted before! Oh wait... (app.net; Path; identi.ca; Ello...)[1] [1] http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/ http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/
facepalm 10y ago
Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora? 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.
- fermuch 10y ago
  GNU social didn't fail. It still has a growing community. Check out mastodon.social to see a newborn server (with it's own implementation of everything, in Ruby) for example. It was featured here some weeks ago.
fixxer 10y ago
Better idea: Let's turn it off and not replace it.
mmbaghdad 10y ago
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.
- soyiuz 10y ago
  I love the first part of your comment: something like Reddit communities (subreddits) with their own cultures of moderation, but on Twitter.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jimmytidey 10y ago
Shout out to mastodon.social [that's the address]- a Twitter alternative running on GNU social. I'm not part of the Dev team, but I do donate to the patreon because I'd love it to succeed.
- daveid 10y ago
  Thanks for the shout out! Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter, with a focus on UX. Github: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ Screenshot and demo video linked from the README
  - peatmoss 10y ago
    Can one move their account to a new instance if, for example, they start on Mastdon, like what they see, and then decide to set up their own instance?
- Torgo 10y ago
  >running GNU social Sorry to be pedantic, but it's implementing OStatus standard.
motiw 10y ago
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 http://blog.postwaves.com/about http://blog.postwaves.com/about
- soyiuz 10y ago
  So, Reddit?
  - motiw 10y ago
    Dynamics is very different than Reddit since each new post is sent only to a small random group of users to vote whether it should be public, no one else sees the post before that, and voter dont know who the submitter is so votes are less biased.
hollander 10y ago
Twitter should be like the blockchain, distributed, signed and independent.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
I have a very simple dream, although I haven't taken the time to code it up. 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. 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.
seanwilson 10y ago
> 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. > ...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. "almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"... 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? 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.
- cpbotha 10y ago
  That's why the following section in the post is titled "what needs to happen" :) I have a good idea of the challenge involved. Because of that, I don't have that much hope that this will succeed, but, due to the fact that the building blocks have been available (and used) for so long, it's interesting to think about (and experiment with) how much effort would be required to make blogs+rss as slick as Twitter.
mrmondo 10y ago
I too love twitter, but we NEED something distributed in nature.
deboboy 10y ago
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'.
- vlunkr 10y ago
  You'll have to explain what you mean by firehose.
- gipp 10y ago
  You're gonna have to elaborate -- usually Twitter's "firehose" means the entire unfiltered stream of all Tweets, which would be beyond useless as a normal user for obvious reasons.
- buzzybee 10y ago
  It's not even possible for a consumer connection to handle the firehose.
mlinksva 10y ago
Free time.
gengkev 10y ago
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.
magoon 10y ago
I've Got $50
f_allwein 10y ago
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"): https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-and-search-as-we-know-it/ https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-a...
bikamonki 10y ago
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. Wanna fix Twitter? Fix trolls. It is far too obvious for the real 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. 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. However, all these fixes would make Twitter less profitable. So, nevermind.
- hyperdunc 10y ago
  "Fix trolls" will turn into a euphemism for "censor contrary opinions".
  - grzm 10y ago
    While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment of not wanting to silence legitimate, civil discourse, I'd like to think there's some middle ground that's broadly acceptable. We don't tolerate people running around cussing at others with impunity. (I'm not going to go into the "contrary opinions" aspect of it, because I think at least for a first approximation general uncivil speech works well enough.) The penalties for doing this in real life are also offset by the cost of actually doing it: you have to physically be there, and others can retreat to private spaces. Online you can spin up fake accounts and bots with nearly all of the cost of dealing with it on the part of the recipient (by for example, blocking the user). What do you think? This is something I've been thinking earnestly about and I'm interested in others opinions.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
"Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account." 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. 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. 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)
rayalez 10y ago
I'm working on a project with this purpose: http://hackertribe.io http://hackertribe.io (It's still work in progress, launching soon) Here's my vision for the ultimate platform: - Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit. - Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter. - Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page. - Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags, publications. - 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). - It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API. - 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. - 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. 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. At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out. 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. If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code over here: https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus (I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).
- tscs37 10y ago
  It doesn't look bad (miles better than GNU Social's UI) I'll probably plug in my email later and check it out when there is some progress! <3
foxhop 10y ago
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. Then if you get bored you can click on a username to view a complete (chronological) feed.
- foxhedgehog 10y ago
  If twitter let you filter tweets and easily build lists around users, it would be most of the way towards being a more functional platform that let you easily finds signal amidst noise.
hashkb 10y ago
'member xanga and Livejournal?
keyle 10y ago
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. 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. 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.
fabrika 10y ago
Even if you build a superior p2p platform you won’t make Elon Musk and Katy Perry sign-up. 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”.
carapace 10y ago
The problem isn't technical. (Any three readers of HN could bang together something "much better" than Twitter in N weeks!) The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Accounting for hyperbole I agree to a certain point, however: > The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it. You would probably be more likely to succeed in that if you start thinking of them as humans, humans who aren't familiar with computers, don't have much time etc etc ;-) Oh, and that guy with the social network said something like that at some point and it is now the most famous quote from him.
apatters 10y ago
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. 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. 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 a deeper problem in society which needs to be resolved through dialogue.
- cpbotha 10y ago
  There's a huge difference between criticism (good) and abuse (bad). You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass guy (I am too BTW). For us it's easy to airquote "twitter abuse" and ask what the problem is. However, for a great number of non-white-middleclass-guy-people it's a huge and real problem that we should do our absolute best to help address.
  - apatters 10y ago
    I'm sorry but this idea that there's mysterious knowledge of hardship which white, male members of the middle class automatically don't possess is garbage and is exactly the sort of thing I was hinting at in the last sentence of my comment. You can be as polite about it as you want but it immediately shuts down dialogue and informs the original speaker that he is the replier's intellectual inferior and his opinion isn't valued. In short it's a form of ad hominem. No matter how well-meaning it distracts from the discussion of the actual issue and drags us into identity politics. In this specific case I think it also demeans publishers who are not white and male. Plenty of non-white, non-male people have been publishing controversial material since long before Twitter existed. Just like the white and male ones, they learned to take the heat or get out of the kitchen. Things like the civil rights movement were accomplished within this context. The issue at hand is not a race or gender issue. All races and genders are being attacked on Twitter. The issue is that some Twitter users don't realize how hot the kitchen can get before they walk into it.
akerro 10y ago
There is Twister[1], distributed, P2P, open-source, censorship-proof Twister clone. http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
esafwan 10y ago
Isn't medium.com everything that you are proposing with more features like intelligent recommender system, flexible layout control etc?

227 points by cpbotha 10y ago

SquidLord 10y ago

It's adorable. I love it when people let their kids on the Internet.

murtnowski 10y ago

Why replace twitter? just do your own thing and let twitter do its thing

welly 10y ago
I suspect your own thing probably wouldn't have the same visibility as twitter and that's partly the appeal of something like twitter.
olegkikin 10y ago
Because of Twitter's censorship. There should be a free (as in speech) alternative.

nixos 10y ago

Google killed its golden egg. Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web: 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. (The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android). Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email). 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. Now their running around as a chicken without a head.

elastic_church 10y ago
> Now their running around as a chicken without a head. And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken No worries
- nixos 10y ago
  >And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s
  - elastic_church 10y ago
    well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend. But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements
    - nihonde 10y ago
      The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        "I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898. Yet it's still going, more than a century later.
        ethbro 10y ago
        Or in other words, "Nobody was ever fired for suggesting they buy from IBM." In the absence of alternatives, marketing money goes to advertising.

cyorir 10y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

mos_basik 10y ago
Pre-emptive apology for longpost - not all of it is aimed at you! This is the first time I've seen Tumblr mentioned in overarching discussion of "what are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter?" that HN (and others) have been having recently. OP's two main concerns about Twitter both stem from the fact that it's a centralized system belonging to one company: 1) It's a single point of failure; everything is lost if Twitter goes bankrupt. 2) Twitter holds and (more visibly, recently) is exercising supreme veto power over who gets to use their product and what they use it for. (Note: opinions diverge here; some think Twitter isn't effective enough at identifying and curtailing abuse; others think Twitter is censoring free speech. Both are possible because of centralization, both are bad.) Tumblr is still centralized and thus solves neither of these concerns, but you are aware of that; you cited it as a possible model, not as a drop-in solution. But real, federated blogging already exists - OP is using Wordpress, not Blogspot, Ghost, etc. (Hey, you can even self host Wordpress! or Jekyll, Hexo, etc.) As discussed elsewhere in this thread, basic tools exist for federated blog networking and discovery - RSS, blog rolls, search engines. Like OP, I think there is significant margin for improvement in the UX of those tools. Tumblr's barrier to entry is almost nil - username, password, bam - but WP's free hosted option honestly isn't far behind. That kind of setup would work for average users. If it had good network/discovery tooling built into the platform using open standards, it'd be on par with Tumblr. But on top of that, a user banned from free WP hosting has the option of buying shared hosting pre-installed with WP from another provider and still being able to participate. It goes down a continuum of ease-of-setup vs. degree of control through VPS to a machine in the basement. "But why would you want people who get banned that much to still be able to publish?" People get bullied off Tumblr not infrequently through malicious mass reporting. The automatic thresholds are not that hard to trip; the people that suffer are the ones that have developed a following but are not "famous". I've seen a webcomic artist disappear from Tumblr because they drew a panel of character A calling character B a virgin insultingly. A fan discussion developed over whether B was canon asexual. The artist contributed and said they weren't. This set off a whole bloc of users who started calling the artist heteronormative and a lot of other things, and they eventually mass reported the artist's accounts and got them banned. Of course there are support channels to rectify this sort of thing, but the process, from what I've seen, is usually painful and slow and not guaranteed to be successful. If the artist gets their account(s) back (which the one in my story did), they now publish in fear of offending that one portion of their fandom, which both dampens their motivation to publish (usually not high for internet artists) and can result in work that panders to the disruptive fans, to the displeasure of the others who were enjoying the artist's original work. If the artist doesn't get their account back (refused by staff or too much trouble), they often lose irreplaceable artwork and history (though shame on them for not doing local backups). If they choose to open a new account, they have have to rebuild their fandom from scratch and PMs to whoever they have non-Tumblr connections with, or they will be found by the troublemakers again and basically be in the same situation as if the account was reopened except still missing all the archives. If both seem like too much trouble, they fold and are never heard from again. Anyway, this kind of thing has happened to too many people that I was interested in who used Tumblr, which is what, three or so? Enough that it seems like a problem. - - - - This is somewhat of an aside, but the design choices Tumblr has made that make it more than a simple blogging platform have strongly colored its community. I found a blogpost titled "The Toxoplasmosa of Rage"[0] a while back that mused at length about why and how people get so mad about the things they do, especially now that we have the Internet facilitating it. Tumblr was only one of many subjects he touched on, but it stuck with me the most. Put succinctly: on Tumblr, you don't comment on posts; you reblog them and add your own commentary. Both post and commentary are seen by the previous (re)blogger(s) and your followers, who often share your views. The result is that if material is only seen by people who like it, everyone is happy - but if (as frequently happens) someone sees something they don't like and are compelled to comment on it, Tumblr's system sets up a perfect storm of vitriol as material is alternately bounced between clusters of the network with opposing opinions. All of which now seems especially ironic to me, given the recent uptick of interest in more accurately identifying echo chambers in media (social and otherwise), and attempting to negate them somehow, possibly by adjusting feed algorithms to expose people to opposing ideas more often. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's worth noting that the traditional blog platform avoids this issue by keeping comments confined to the post they were made on. There are some systems that fuzzy the system so it isn't totally compartmentalized. Disqus is its own little network, for instance. I think Wordpress uses its own commenting ecosystem so people can click on the profile pic of your comment and find your blog, if you have one. Backlinking also increases connectivity by letting readers know who has responded to the piece they're reading, which I hardly consider a bad thing. Maybe the context shifts forced by systems like backlinking or comment linking dampen fly-off-the-handle emotional reactions that fuel flame wars like on Tumblr or Twitter. HN does something similar by hiding the reply link from the front page when a chain nests deep enough, forcing you to go to the comment's own page to reply. Just a little kick, asking "is replying really necessary?". [0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ (CTRL-F for "completely different" if you only want Section V that mentions Tumblr)

pmlnr 10y ago

> Let’s replace Twitter with something much better Federated XMPP?

mikebay 10y ago

I would like to replace twitter with something else who do not supress my opinions, hide my posts, delete my account, give my details and geo positions to NSA... oh too many reasons to skip twitter really. I really hate these censorship business companies. Freedom of speech in internet today seems to be decied by Facebook, Google and Twitter. All these corporations have long history of violating peoples privacy and hiding peoples opinions. Im very happy that people start to find / develop alternatives. Dear Twitter, your censorship and agenda is wrong and you should be shutted down!

mzw_mzw 10y ago

A burning dumpster full of medical waste would be better than Twitter, so fortunately the bar is low.

mikebay 10y ago

Since @Twitter is now in the #censorship business, I will no longer use its service for my constitutional right to free speech. #GoodbyeAll - @RealJamesWoods

tedunangst 10y ago

So, replace twitter with the thing that Twitter replaced?

cpbotha 10y ago
It is a cunning plan!

oniMaker 10y ago

Not to mention the fact that Twitter will censor views that it does not agree with. Don't support companies that engage in censorship. There's already an alternative available, and it's growing: https://gab.ai https://gab.ai 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.

riffic 10y ago
Is gab.ai an implementation of OStatus? https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
- oniMaker 10y ago
  Not to my knowledge. The platform is very young though. You could propose this idea to the founder.
- Torgo 10y ago
  No, it doesn't appear to implement any of OStatus.
mikeyouse 10y ago
Gab is predictably filled with Nazis, which isn't unrelated to that idiotic Pepe frog they use as a logo. Who would willingly go there?
- oniMaker 10y ago
  People who believe in freedom of speech.
  - mikeyouse 10y ago
    If the difference between Twitter's speech limits and Gab's is that the latter allows Nazis and harassment, I think you'll find most prefer "less" free speech.

riffic 10y ago

OStatus/GNU social.

jaxondu 10y ago

Maybe a modern Usenet? Any idea what are the pain points of Usenet?

pfarnsworth 10y ago
Reddit is the modern Usenet. And it's about 1000x better, from my own personal experience.
josh64 10y ago
spam for one.

kovrik 10y ago

Honestly, I'm really tired of all these 'Let's replace Twitter', 'Twitter is dead' etc. stuff. Yes, Twitter is not perfect from business perspective, but users should not care. Twitter is also not perfect from users' perspective, but it works and people use it. That is enough.

wallacoloo 10y ago
Yeah, just like Notepad "works" as a text editor. If there's room for improvement, why not improve?
- kovrik 10y ago
  Agree: "Then improve", but not "Write another blog post about it"
  - igor47 10y ago
    That's just ludicrous. Promoting a new product is part of building that product.
searchfaster 10y ago
Agree.. twitter is far from dead. Looking at reddit data, Mention of twitter is skyrocketing (election driven). http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analytics&page=1&subreddit=&domain=&q=twitter http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy... Twitter rules in sports and politics.. http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analytics&page=1&subreddit=&domain=twitter.com&q= http://searchreddit.net/?relevance&direction=desc&view=analy...

throwaway420 10y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

makomk 10y ago

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.

jstimpfle 10y ago

The difficult to decentralize parts: - hashtags (big aggregators are needed that can answer hashtag queries). Similarly, proposing new tweeters to follow, etc. - receiving messages. This needs more than RSS, which is only a pull mechanism. It needs both push and pull. Then there are social problems. 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). 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.)

tschellenbach 10y ago
At the end of the day users just don't care about decentralization. They do care about: * The network of users present on the app * Quality of the mobile and desktop clients * Ability to have success promoting their own voice/ content Decentralization kills innovation in the underlying protocol. (see email for a nice example of common standards holding things back). It also creates a situation were nobody can effectively monetize the platform. Which makes it hard to create a competitive product. Sure, open standards work well for many things, don't think it will ever catch on for social networks though.
- jstimpfle 10y ago
  I'm not sure if I want innovation in the underlying protocol. A protocol should be exactly that, underlying. What ideas do you have for innovation? The only problem with email that I can think of is the lack of end-to-end encryption. But that's a social, not technical problem.
- confounded 10y ago
  Another thing that they care about way more than we recognize, is "the latest trend among tech nerds" Focusing on the Everyman is essential if your criteria for value is a consumer mindshare natural-monopoly (and an exit for VCs) within five years. The next five years will probably have less of those companies than the last five, and (if the tone of newspapers are anything to go by) ordinary people are becoming distrustful of large monopolistic companies. Now seems like a good time to hack on what we want. I can't think of a better time for a new, open, social network.

rrggrr 10y ago

A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/ https://deaddrops.com/). "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. The back and forth fight between the two is healthy.

brian-armstrong 10y ago
Do you know of anyone who's combining one or more of these, in app form, for this purpose? I have made an "audio encoder" (https://github.com/quiet https://github.com/quiet) and I've given some thought to how you might make a mesh tweet network on top of it, but real world constraints are hard.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> A multi-protocol solution is sorely needed. One that combines mesh networking, internet, QR, audio encoding, even USB dead drops (https://deaddrops.com/ https://deaddrops.com/). Add APRS and regular ham radio. I'm only half-joking, it would be pretty cool to have something like that! :).
- duskwuff 10y ago
  I've heard some really interesting things about the LoRa packet radio protocol. Runs in ISM bands (433/868/915 MHz), low-power, excellent range (2 km urban, 20+ km LOS).

mschuster91 10y ago

The problem with blogs is: they lack private, instant communication channels. 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. 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.

GirlsCanCode 10y ago

Translation: "My candidate lost, so I'm blaming the Internet."

thinkmassive 10y ago

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. 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.

mrwnmonm 10y ago

i used to read a lot of blogs before, i don't know why now i can't stand reading a long article

tschellenbach 10y ago

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. 2. RSS is great, we've just launched this little open source project https://github.com/getstream/winds https://github.com/getstream/winds But by no means does RSS replace Twitter. RSS will never become mainstream like Twitter has (to some extent) 3. The author has a point about the various issues with Twitter's usability.

ryukafalz 10y ago
>In fact, the vast majority of users will actively avoid such a system. Why is this?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Harder to set up. With centralized systems, all you need is the URL and you can get the magic social-stuffy box on any device you have. (TBH a centralized service actually feels better, too, because you know it's the service and not some random collection of pieces held together by agreement and duct tape. Partitioning problems are pain enough with centralized services at scale, but they're worse with decentralized ones.)
  - posterboy 10y ago
    Also, the promise that it's safe because you can check the source is really lost when, you know, you can't actually check the source for lack of time, skill or trust in the chain of trust.
  - radarsat1 10y ago
    I've never understood why P2P always goes for the end users.. in most cases it doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention -- harder to set up, etc. (For some reason bittorrent became the exception that proves the rule.) However, I think there must be something between true user-to-user P2P and completely centralised systems. Why not something like Twitter or Facebook but where lots of different people can set up servers, and accept users? The servers could exchange information and act like a "single" service with a standard protocol, and users would not need to set up a thing, only choose which server to use, but otherwise the experience would be more or less identical, with access to the same information and profiles, all cached and mirrored. (I call this myself a "federated P2P system", not sure if that's a good term.) Of course such a system would need some crypto support to ensure that data is not easily spoofed and man-in-the-middle modified, but different servers could offer different ways of curating news feeds, etc., and some competition on the front-end where all competitors have access to the same decentralised back-end data would be just fantastic. I think one example of this was OpenID, which seems to have failed unfortunately. I always thought it was a cool idea. But it seems that people need more than just a common protocol, they really need a common entity to adhere to, they need to be able to say "I'm on X" and for everyone to know what that means and how to find them. And a single company with a single domain seems to provide that. Unfortunately being open protocol and open source and all that, while well-intentioned, is simply no replacement for a really good marketing department.

mijustin 10y ago

This is what the folks at https://tent.io https://tent.io were trying to do: create a messaging protocol that was decentralized (like email). 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. If you're going to create an alternative, it has to be able to hit critical mass.

angry-hacker 10y ago
Don't forget the free (?) advertising media gives them. Well media is who using it in the first place of course, but it's strange twitter is not able to leverage that to go more mainstream. It's an echo chamber for journalists and activists. Normal people don't use twitter either, they use fb, instagram, snapchat.

toomuchstuff 10y ago

how does he manage to sound so insufferable over something so insignificant. this is prime hn content.

lucaspiller 10y ago

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. 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.

bootload 10y ago
"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." Follow Dave Winer and absorb the lessons he has/is solving ~ http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.html http://scripting.com/2016/11/19/fasterScriptingcomHomePage.h...
TulliusCicero 10y ago
Free, open source projects generally suck at good UX and gaining momentum, and I'm not sure either of those is a solvable problem. Well sometimes you can fix it if there's a major corporate backer willing to fund a bunch of full-time devs, but that's not really consistently reproducible.
jlj 10y ago
What if the corporate structure reserved ownership shares for the users, and/or per-impression ad revenue went directly to the content creators. Some way to keep control distributed instead of centralized, that is baked into the company charter from day 1.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  I don't think that would really solve anything. You can go out and buy shares in Alphabet if you want, but if (without the funds of say Warren Buffet) you think that's going to stop them selling your data to advertisers, good luck.

quinndupont 10y ago

It's never been attempted before! Oh wait... (app.net; Path; identi.ca; Ello...)[1] [1] http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/ http://alternativeto.net/software/twitter/

facepalm 10y ago

Why did gnu social fail? What happened to diaspora? 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.

fermuch 10y ago
GNU social didn't fail. It still has a growing community. Check out mastodon.social to see a newborn server (with it's own implementation of everything, in Ruby) for example. It was featured here some weeks ago.

fixxer 10y ago

Better idea: Let's turn it off and not replace it.

mmbaghdad 10y ago

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.

soyiuz 10y ago
I love the first part of your comment: something like Reddit communities (subreddits) with their own cultures of moderation, but on Twitter.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jimmytidey 10y ago

Shout out to mastodon.social [that's the address]- a Twitter alternative running on GNU social. I'm not part of the Dev team, but I do donate to the patreon because I'd love it to succeed.

daveid 10y ago
Thanks for the shout out! Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter, with a focus on UX. Github: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ Screenshot and demo video linked from the README
- peatmoss 10y ago
  Can one move their account to a new instance if, for example, they start on Mastdon, like what they see, and then decide to set up their own instance?
Torgo 10y ago
>running GNU social Sorry to be pedantic, but it's implementing OStatus standard.

motiw 10y ago

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 http://blog.postwaves.com/about http://blog.postwaves.com/about

soyiuz 10y ago
So, Reddit?
- motiw 10y ago
  Dynamics is very different than Reddit since each new post is sent only to a small random group of users to vote whether it should be public, no one else sees the post before that, and voter dont know who the submitter is so votes are less biased.

hollander 10y ago

Twitter should be like the blockchain, distributed, signed and independent.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

I have a very simple dream, although I haven't taken the time to code it up. 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. 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.

seanwilson 10y ago

> 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. > ...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. "almost exactly like Twitter"..."not much more complicated"... 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? 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.

cpbotha 10y ago
That's why the following section in the post is titled "what needs to happen" :) I have a good idea of the challenge involved. Because of that, I don't have that much hope that this will succeed, but, due to the fact that the building blocks have been available (and used) for so long, it's interesting to think about (and experiment with) how much effort would be required to make blogs+rss as slick as Twitter.

mrmondo 10y ago

I too love twitter, but we NEED something distributed in nature.

deboboy 10y ago

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'.

vlunkr 10y ago
You'll have to explain what you mean by firehose.
gipp 10y ago
You're gonna have to elaborate -- usually Twitter's "firehose" means the entire unfiltered stream of all Tweets, which would be beyond useless as a normal user for obvious reasons.
buzzybee 10y ago
It's not even possible for a consumer connection to handle the firehose.

mlinksva 10y ago

Free time.

gengkev 10y ago

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.

magoon 10y ago

I've Got $50

f_allwein 10y ago

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"): https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-and-search-as-we-know-it/ https://www.wired.com/2013/02/the-end-of-the-web-computers-a...

bikamonki 10y ago

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. Wanna fix Twitter? Fix trolls. It is far too obvious for the real 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. 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. However, all these fixes would make Twitter less profitable. So, nevermind.

hyperdunc 10y ago
"Fix trolls" will turn into a euphemism for "censor contrary opinions".
- grzm 10y ago
  While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment of not wanting to silence legitimate, civil discourse, I'd like to think there's some middle ground that's broadly acceptable. We don't tolerate people running around cussing at others with impunity. (I'm not going to go into the "contrary opinions" aspect of it, because I think at least for a first approximation general uncivil speech works well enough.) The penalties for doing this in real life are also offset by the cost of actually doing it: you have to physically be there, and others can retreat to private spaces. Online you can spin up fake accounts and bots with nearly all of the cost of dealing with it on the part of the recipient (by for example, blocking the user). What do you think? This is something I've been thinking earnestly about and I'm interested in others opinions.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

"Setting up a blog at for example WordPress.com is not much more complicated than creating a new Twitter account." 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. 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. 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)

rayalez 10y ago

I'm working on a project with this purpose: http://hackertribe.io http://hackertribe.io (It's still work in progress, launching soon) Here's my vision for the ultimate platform: - Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit. - Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter. - Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page. - Publishing tools work like on Medium - beautiful editor, tags, publications. - 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). - It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API. - 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. - 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. 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. At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part - decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out. 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. If you would like to contribute to it's development - you can find the code over here: https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus (I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).

tscs37 10y ago
It doesn't look bad (miles better than GNU Social's UI) I'll probably plug in my email later and check it out when there is some progress! <3

foxhop 10y ago

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. Then if you get bored you can click on a username to view a complete (chronological) feed.

foxhedgehog 10y ago
If twitter let you filter tweets and easily build lists around users, it would be most of the way towards being a more functional platform that let you easily finds signal amidst noise.

hashkb 10y ago

'member xanga and Livejournal?

keyle 10y ago

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. 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. 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.

fabrika 10y ago

Even if you build a superior p2p platform you won’t make Elon Musk and Katy Perry sign-up. 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”.

carapace 10y ago

The problem isn't technical. (Any three readers of HN could bang together something "much better" than Twitter in N weeks!) The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it.

reitanqild 10y ago
Accounting for hyperbole I agree to a certain point, however: > The problem is getting three hundred million dumbasses to use it. You would probably be more likely to succeed in that if you start thinking of them as humans, humans who aren't familiar with computers, don't have much time etc etc ;-) Oh, and that guy with the social network said something like that at some point and it is now the most famous quote from him.

apatters 10y ago

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. 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. 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 a deeper problem in society which needs to be resolved through dialogue.

cpbotha 10y ago
There's a huge difference between criticism (good) and abuse (bad). You're most probably (I say that in the statistical sense) a white middleclass guy (I am too BTW). For us it's easy to airquote "twitter abuse" and ask what the problem is. However, for a great number of non-white-middleclass-guy-people it's a huge and real problem that we should do our absolute best to help address.
- apatters 10y ago
  I'm sorry but this idea that there's mysterious knowledge of hardship which white, male members of the middle class automatically don't possess is garbage and is exactly the sort of thing I was hinting at in the last sentence of my comment. You can be as polite about it as you want but it immediately shuts down dialogue and informs the original speaker that he is the replier's intellectual inferior and his opinion isn't valued. In short it's a form of ad hominem. No matter how well-meaning it distracts from the discussion of the actual issue and drags us into identity politics. In this specific case I think it also demeans publishers who are not white and male. Plenty of non-white, non-male people have been publishing controversial material since long before Twitter existed. Just like the white and male ones, they learned to take the heat or get out of the kitchen. Things like the civil rights movement were accomplished within this context. The issue at hand is not a race or gender issue. All races and genders are being attacked on Twitter. The issue is that some Twitter users don't realize how hot the kitchen can get before they walk into it.

akerro 10y ago

There is Twister[1], distributed, P2P, open-source, censorship-proof Twister clone. http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

esafwan 10y ago

Isn't medium.com everything that you are proposing with more features like intelligent recommender system, flexible layout control etc?