Ask HN: Why haven't alternatives to Twitter taken off?

What's your definition of "taken off"?

My opinion, what's the return on joining yet another social media network so you can receive ads and see messages from bots screaming about mRNA vaccines and Hunter Biden's laptop? That's one extreme. The other is highly controlled content from dictators-for-life (e.g. unelected moderators or technology company employees) who will ban/shut you down for expressing an opinion that doesn't fit their narrative. It's fine until it's you they decide to cancel. The only way to avoid that is be an invisible lurker.. but then, why not read a newspaper or a dedicated topic website instead? At least everyone writing in a newspaper isn't intellectually challenged or a bot.

Using your real name isn't enjoyable anymore because people look for things to use against you. Did you say or do something 25 years ago that today people will penalize you for? They'll search for it. So, using a handle.. ok, see the first paragraph above.

What does one get out of joining new social media? You can be amazingly creative or eloquent. Nobody is going to care and whatever it was, it is forgotten the next day. Create or dialogue for your own entertainment, at the end of the day, it's completely unproductive. No one will remember your contribution, no one will even remember you existed the next day.

I think we've all seen enough photos of people's dinners or pets.

So what is left?

I think one problem is audience reach. It's all-or-nothing. Do you really always want to broadcast to the world? (Twitter) or do you always want to broadcast only to your "friends" (Facebook) or do you want to collect names but never speak out of fear of workplace politics (LinkedIn).

One social media network I thought was interesting, but is dead now due to mismanagement (as usual) was Google+. It had the concept of circles. It was more work absolutely, but you could tag people with being a family member, or a highschool friend or a circle of people who climbed Mt. Everest with you. The advantage of this would be you could write about how great this nylon rope is, and not have it go to your family or work colleagues in the non-rope industry, or whatever.

It took years, but Google+ was STARTING to grow, then Google as usual decided to kill it off, along with Hangouts which was their iMessage competitor (included SMS at one point).

All the "alternatives" focus on decentralization or some other technobabble and address zero of the concerns that non-tech people have with mainstream social networks.

> What do these people care about, then?

Bad user experience, ads and conflict of interest with regards to monetization (the user wants to use the product to see content they want to see, but the platform wants to show the user content - or ads, or as we used to call it: spam - it wants the user to see).

> As far as I can tell, the majority of them were perfectly contented with Twitter as-is until Elon bought it

The majority of them are actually content even after Elon bought it. The only thing that really spilled outside of "tech Twitter" was the banning of journalists. Everything else is just tech people making up a storm in a teacup.

People want a Twitter alternative that is easy to use and configure. Mastodon is too complex to configure and no verification system or blue dot to tell the real deals from the fakes.

Remember that Trump built a Twitter alternative that didn't take off either.

It is like comparing macOS to Linux.