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

There are plenty of thriving communities on Slack and Discord and Mastodon, often private, that seem to be doing just fine despite, or perhaps because of having a code of conduct that everyone agrees to before joining.

I'm not sure how you expect a platform to escape having bots screaming about Hunter Bidens laptop unless there are guidelines on what constitutes good conduct, with repercussions for violating them, so that the bots can be banned. That you've made the leap of logic to conclude that only "highly controlled content from dictators-for-life (e.g. unelected moderators or technology company employees)" will be approved is your loss.

Every community has their own biases, and if you need a safe space to post your screed against the blacks/the whites/Jews/Gentiles/gays/straights/immigrants/natives/bankers/soccer moms/the rich/the poor/cats/dinner pics/etc don't worry, there's a community out there for you.

Extremely prissy piece-of-shit useless attitudes from the people who should know better and should be the alpha geeks leading the charge, but instead have piss & spray to spread instead. This world is far more malleable & interested in switching up than anyone rates & the little niceties everyone swears are the death of all alternatives are actually basically irrelevant: the social pressure of the leavers hasn't built up enough, hasn't materialized visibly enough, and worst-most is so very actively undermined by so many doomsaying negativity-bearing anti-trying attitudes, so abundantly on display, that defeatism dominates trying. The should-be, capable, could do folk are actively working against trying, are busy convincing everyone else not to bother even exploring or trying.

Except not really, or only partially. The network externalities Twitter is possession of, as the sole actually interconnected global platform- where any given post potentially stands a greater than zero chance of showing up for you- is a huge factor that's hard to overcome with competitive compatibility. It's the Apple iMessage of the inteenet, a miserable locked in piece of shit rattrap no one can ever escape from or improve, that the victim users have no choice but to keep using, for the circular logical fact that most other people also haven't left & to try to leave yourself would be akin to voluntary noospheric exile.

The actual costs aren't really so awful, if the geeks lead the way & actually work to subvert the rat trap behaviors. But there's just vast negativity. People fucking love pissing on good tech & good alternatives & prognosticating from the chair why it won't work, why it's wrong, why it will never work. But it's actually quite easy, works fine, it's just conservative prissy attitude & lack of try, the social fact that these doomsayer voices predestine us to disbelieve, to not try.

Thankfully I just see a ton of hope on the horizon. Intranet walled garden winter won't be forever. Whether it's ActivityPub (semi complex), Noste (dead fucking simple), ssb/handshake, or just email+++ (deltachat) or xmpp or matrix doesn't really matter, and if any starts winning for real it will likely syndicate elsewhere, and POSSE will happen.

So I think in a way the premise of the question is a bit weird. The likely outcome is _not_ that 250 million people up sticks and move to Mastodon or nostr or the Facebook Twitter-y thing or the Tumblr activitypub thing or some latter-day Google Buzz or whatever. Like, that _could_ happen, I suppose, but it is not historically how social networks die.

Take LiveJournal. The 'alternative' to LiveJournal, by and large, was not another LiveJournal; LiveJournal users just shifted their attention to various other _different_ things (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, maybe Deviantart?) as it died. For those who really wanted another LiveJournal there was DreamWidth and similar (you could see those as a partial analogy to Mastodon for Twitter), but that's not where most people went.

I'm not sure that the like-for-like replacement thing has _ever_ happened. Maybe Friendster?